American soprano Patricia Racette was honored at the sixth annual Opera News Awards, sponsored by the magazine, which is affiliated with the Metropolitan Opera. The event took place on April 17 at the Plaza Hotel.  Other honorees were tenor Jonas Kaufmann, conductor Riccardo Muti, soprano Kiri Te Kanawa and bass-baritone Bryn Terfel.

In an essay giving lauds to Racette, writer Oussama Zahr touches on Racette being out in just the second paragraph. He goes back to a 2002 Opera News interview when she said, “You know, this career is so all-encompassing that to try and disengage such a huge aspect of my life is not logical, not feasible.”

For more on Racette’s attitudes towards being out and also her 13-year relationship with mezzo Beth Clayton, check out this story from After Ellen.  The couple made a rather sweet and affection video discussing their relationship for the “It Gets Better” campaign.

He knows his way around the black and white notes of a tradition piano keyboard plenty well, having studied at the Chopin Academy in his native Warsaw. But for the last 20 years he’s created and performed original works that combined the piano with video. Kapuscinski will appear at EMPAC on Saturday night (4/16) in a program titled “Catch the Tiger.”

“I perform audio-visually and create narratives that connect different media. I’m an inter-media composer,” explains Kapuscinski. “I like the term inter-media rather than multi-media because it’s about the media speaking to each other in interesting ways. New forms arrive by joining the two together.”

Kapuscinski says that early in his career, when booked to perform concert or compose a piece, he would ask extensive questions about the visual setting and environment of the planned performance. It was at the Banff Center, in Alberta Canada, around 1988 that he was first introduced to computer animation and video.

“It became really clear to me, ‘Oh I have found what I always wanted to do,’” he recalls. “From there on, I never stopped and I always have a visual. But an important part remains live music in performance. And I like to do it myself.”

A Kapuscinski creation is far more than a piano piece with film or video running in parallel time. He performs on the Yamaha Disklavier, a kind of piano/computer fusion programmed so that each touch of the keyboard triggers aspects of the accompanying video.

“I am able to turn the computer into a chamber musician that plays visuals,” says Kapuscinski, who’s been on the music and media faculty at Sanford since 2008. “As I play my part on the piano, the computer listens and plays the visual parts I composed for it. It’s completely in synch with what I do.”

“Timing and the approach to tempo is everything in music,” continues Kapuscinski. “Each single note makes a total difference in expression. In live performance I’m editing my visuals with the same kind of expressive ability.”

Music may remain the driving force in Kapuscinski’s art, but Saturday’s program of five works embraces a number of non-musical topics and fields, including visual art, poetry, mathematics and food. “Mondrian Variations” uses animations of paintings by the Dutch master. In “Catch the Tiger,” the simple piano melodies trigger increasingly complex strings of numbers onscreen.

There’s also “Juicy,” with visuals of fresh fruit, and “Oli’s Dream,” a collaboration with poet Camille Norton. In the latter, lines of text appear on the overhead screen one letter at a time with accompanying sounds that resemble the clatter of a typewriter. “Oli,” in the title, is a reference to the Olivetti typewriter. (Kapuscinski says when he and Norton created the piece they’d not heard of Leroy Anderson’s “The Typewriter,” though he’s since been told about it countless times.)

“Where Is Chopin?” was created in celebration of last year’s 200th anniversary of Chopin’s birth. The largest and most recent piece in the concert, it also honors Kapuscinski’s musical and national heritage.

“Chopin is very much in my blood. I grew up in Poland and, as a pianist, he informed who I was,” says Kapuscinski. “I’m still very fond of his music, the balance of reason and emotion.”

To gather visual material, Kapuscinski sought out similar devotees in 12 cities around the world, as far a field as Tokyo, Helsinki, Buenos Aires and Istanbul.

“I met 150 people and played for them the 24 Preludes Op. 28. On three screens you see their faces as they react to the music,” he explains. “But what I play is not actually Chopin any more. Just as I edited the listeners, choosing the most poignant moments, I also took the Chopin preludes and contemplated their essences and used what I thought corresponded to the essential moments. It becomes a new encounter with Chopin.”

Originally appeared in the Times Union.

GAY EARS ADDENDUM:

Kapuscinski is married to Canadian composer Francois Rose. They’ve been together for 16 years and were married in 2004.

“I’m thrilled and lucky and extremely happy,” says Kapuscinski.  ”Gay or not gay, these long relationships don’t seem to be found very often anymore. But now we have a challenge.  I got this job in Stanford and Francois has a good job as a composer at the University of the Pacific, two hours away by car without traffic. So we have to travel to each other on weekends. Like any married couple, we have these problems  of commuting.”

A two-composer family poses fewer problems than distant jobs.

“We understand each other’s passion… but also appreciate that we’re different.  It always comes as a shock to the system that your loved one falls asleep during your favorite movie or that they’re excited about something you would otherwise ignore.  We don’t tell each other what to do, but on a higher level we connect and understand each other’s passion for music.”

Here’s a recent candid photo from a get-away in Mendocina, California.

A true American original, Harrison was a composer of great lyric gifts and a maverick who espoused “world music” before we called it that. He was also an ardent environmentalist and pacifist, a poet and Esperanto scholar, an accomplished calligrapher and painter, and an out, gay man in a time when that was not an easy thing to be.

This “mini-festival” was amazingly well attended — it was a great antidote to the commonly heard refrain “classical music/contemporary music is a dying art form which audiences no longer support.” If a series like this can prosper in DC, not always known for embracing new and different things, it’s a good sign!

The first program featured a preview screening of a new documentary by filmmaker and Harrison friend and collaborator Eva Soltes. The film “Lou Harrison: A World of Music” is informative and entertaining, and features interviews with Harrison, Merce Cunningham, and Dennis Russell Davies, among others. It also captures some very touching moments shared between Harrison and his lover Bill Colvig. It’s difficult to portray a life in 90 minutes, but I left this screening with a very strong sense of the man and the life he led. The documentary is not yet commercially available, but plans are in the works to release it on DVD.

The second event, a look at the influence of Indonesian gamelan music on Harrison’s work, featured fine performances by the Wesleyan University Gamelan Ensemble playing the instruments housed at the Indonesian Embassy. Unfortunately, the keynote address delivered by composer and Harrison scholar Bill Alves, plagued by audio troubles throughout, presented a chronological biography of Lou Harrison instead of focusing on the evening’s stated theme: the relationship between Harrison and gamelan. (The next night, Alves was much more comfortable and informative delivering extemporaneous remarks during stage changes at the concert.)

The concluding night’s concert was divided into two parts. The first half featured the Wesleyan gamelan players again, led by their music director Sumarsam, in two Harrison works combining traditional gamelan forces with non-Indonesian instruments. Pianist Lisa Moore gave a sturdy rendition of the first movement of the “Concerto for Piano & Javanese Gamelan,” a very non-Western concerto in which the piano, tuned to the gamelan’s tuning, participates more as a member of the ensemble than a stand-alone soloist. “Burbaran Robert” for trumpet and gamelan gave piccolo trumpet soloist Chris Gekker a chance to walk to various positions throughout the auditorium, playing Baroque-inflected figures from different locations. I found the theatrical effect of the lone trumpeter playing throughout the hall strangely touching: at the end, he simply walked down the aisle and disappeared.

For the second half, Angel Gil-Ordóñez led the Post-Classical Ensemble in two more substantial works. The first of these was the highlight of the evening: the monumental 1985 “Piano Concerto,” played with great intensity and beauty by pianist Benjamin Pasternack. Although this concerto was recorded in 1988 by Keith Jarrett (who commissioned it), live performances of it are rare. That’s a shame, because there’s a lot to like here. Memories of Brahms, Schumann, and even Beethoven work their way into the Eastern-influenced material in a truly original way. Pasternack brought a fresh interpretation to the piece (including an improvised cadenza in the first movement), and I also was able to hear things from the orchestra that I’ve never heard on the Jarrett recording. The virtuostic second movement “Stampede” is not to be believed: a crashing athletic game of chase between a drummer and the pianist, who needs the help of a felt-covered wooden “octave bar” to facilitate the incredibly fast cluster playing Harrison calls for. After the gorgeous time-suspending slow movement, the perpetual-motion finale was given an appropriately relaxed reading, quietly spinning itself out of existence.

The concert concluded with the “Four Strict Songs.” This 1955 work is based on four poems by Harrison himself, modeled after Navajo nature-praise songs, each set to a different five-tone scale (part of the “strictness” of the title), but achieving surprising variety as a set. They were given a fine performance by The George Washington University Chamber Singers.

The works of Harrison should be heard more often. They’re audience-friendly without ever being simplistic, they feel relevantly modern in a way that a lot of the music of the 20th century doesn’t, and they’re well written. If the audience for this festival was any indication, the interest is there, waiting to be satisfied.

Scott Pender is a Washington, DC-based composer.

Previously on My Big Gay Ears:

Harrison documentary debuts at National Gallery on February 26

CD Review: Lou Harrison, Scenes from Cavafy

Remembering Lou Harrison’s gentle queer spirit

Best of all, they sing to each other.

Besides the positive nature of their portrayal, a touching part of this pair is that they’re members of the high school glee club.  Choirs – at school and church – were for me a safe haven from bullying as well as a place to begin to learn how to express myself and explore my artistic side.

If only I could have flirted with the other choir buys as freely or have sung as well as these guys do!  Actually the sound of the musical numbers on Glee is often too over produced for my tastes. But I can get past  that when I see Kurt and Blaine making eyes at each other.  You go boys!

This week’s cover story for Entertainment Weekly is about more than just these two, but the increasing presence of gay teens on the tube.  And an EW video of the actors yacking about the show and their roles is available here.

Some of their musical numbers can be viewed on YouTube (but not on this site).

Finally, Towleroad (a terrific gay news site) has been following this pair, their awards, their pictures and interviews, for months. A full chronology is here.

They collaborated in 2008 on a piano concerto with video, “In Seven Days.” The piece was performed January 6-8 by the New York Philharmonic, with Ades as soloist and music director Alan Gilbert conducting.  Unfortunately there’s no mention of the fact that they are partners on the Philharmonic’s website nor in Anthony Tommassini’s Times review (okay, maybe he didn’t know).

But if these two were husband and wife, wouldn’t it be part of the narrative? Think of all the times that pianist Yvonne Loriod played music by her husband Olivier Messien. Was their relationship ever not mentioned?

There’s a short excerpt of the opening of the concerto on Rosner’s website.

Tommasini’s review is here:  “A Soundtrack for the Chaos, Light and Dark of Creation”

Mark Swed’s 2008 review in the LA Times of the piece at Disney Hall is here:  “Ades continues with his spellbinding ways”

By the way, I couldn’t remember the name of Ades’ partner and only vaguely remembered that he was some kind of artist, perhaps in video. But the following paragraph in the Times got me thinking:

In an onstage conversation with Mr. Gilbert before the performance, Mr. Adès explained that from the start he and Mr. Rosner worked collaboratively. Mr. Adès would write “10 seconds of music,” he said; then Mr. Rosner would fashion images. Or sometimes it was the other way around, but always in incremental segments.

Now I ask you, what kind of collaborative team but a couple could work together so closely?

ADDENDUM: Another Ades/Rosner orchestra/video collaboration premiered in late January as part of the inaugural concerts at the New World Center, the new Frank Ghery-designed home of the New World Symphony in Miami.  Tommasini’s review is here.

In today’s Arts & Leisure section of the

Scanning the web, this is the only reference I can find to Denk’s sexuality.  There is, however, this snippet of an interview with Stephen Marc Beaudoin for the Porland Mercury in July, 2009:

SMB: One of the long-standing dream recording projects you’ve shared with me involves something with ten cute twinky gay boy composers.
JD: Yes, that’s a dream. Gay twinky boys. It probably won’t be called that.

SMB: What will it be called?
JD: I don’t know. I don’t know what it will be called. I have basically, you know, I have a lot of pleasure playing new pieces, but sometimes you play new pieces, you get a piece of crap, so it takes time to find new pieces you believe in, and practice them.

SMB: Are there cute gay twinky boy composers you do believe in?
JD: There are, and there are also cute straight boy composers I believe in, and also cute women composers, and non-cute men and women composers I believe in.

I interviewed Denk about three years ago and have reviewed him in concert twice. I’m adding those pieces to the blog and the links are below. Don’t know where my Gaydar was when talking to him. On a low setting, perhaps. (It was a phoner after all.) But let this be proof that I do not ask every artist I interview about their sexuality (even when I think they’re kinda cute).

Concert review: Denk plays Ives and Bach (4/24/10, Times Union)

Concert review: Denk plays Ives and Beethoven (12/11/07)

Interview with Jeremy Denk (12/6/07)

AP:  An annual $150,000 prize has been established by the foundation of Tony-winning playwright-director Arthur Laurents and partner Tom Hatcher. The Laurents/Hatcher Foundation Award will be given for an unproduced, full-length play of social relevance by an emerging American playwright. The prize includes a $50,000 cash award for the selected playwright and a $100,000 grant for production costs of the play’s premiere at a nonprofit theater.

The foundation said Thursday it’s the first major award for playwrighting to be named in honor of a gay couple. The 92-year-old Laurents wrote the books for “Gypsy” and “West Side Story.” Hatcher was Laurents’ partner of 52 years. The actor and real estate developer died in 2006.

Submissions from invited applicants will be accepted June 15 to Sept. 15. The first award recipient will be notified March 15.

According to tax filings, the Laurents/Hatcher Foundation is based in Riverhead, NY and had approximately $5.6 million in assets in 2008.

Laurents’ generosity brings to mind Aaron Copland, who left his copyrights to a foundation that supports American music. The Aaron Copland Fund for Music has been giving grants totaling about $2 million annually for almost 20 years now.  In a recent interview, former Copland Fund president John Harbison said that the income flows primarily from just four pieces of music.  The late Virgil Thomson, another “bachelor composer” (no direct family heirs), also established a foundation with his will. But his music and writing never had the same kind of popular success as did that of Laurents and Copland.

He died in Williston Vermont on May 30 at age 76.

Make my grave shape of heart so like a flower be free aired and handsome felt.
Grave root pillow, tung up from grave & wigle at blown up clowd.
Ear turnes close to underlayer of green felt moss & sound
of rain dribble thru this layer
down to the roots that will tickle my ear.
Hay grave, my toes need cutting so file away in sound curve or
Garbage grave, way above my head, blood will soon
trickle into my ear –
no choice but the grave, so cat & sheep are daisey turned.
Train will tug my grave, my breath hueing gentil vapor between weel & track
So kitten string & ball, jumpe over this mound so gently & cutely
So my toe can curl & become a snail & go curiousely on its  way.

1958 NYC

The above comes from CLEAN ASSHOLE POEMS & SMILING VEGETABLE SONGS (1978, City Lights Books), which I found (first edition!) in a used porn shop in the Castro a few years ago.  Here’s the copy from the back cover:

First harvest of 1958-1978 eternal decades’ poetry by Peter Orlovsky, born July 8, 1933, in the vanished Women’s Infirmary in Lower East Side N.Y. Sometime ambulance Attendant, farmer, house cleaner, skilkscreen handyman, newsboy, Postal Clerk & instructor at Kerouac School of Poetics, he was discharged from Military after telling government psychiatrist, “An army is an army against love.” witness of the ’50s San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, he was portrayed by Jack Kerouac as hospital nurse saint Simon Darlovsky among Desolation Angels, learned driving speech from Neal Cassady & taught heart in return, partook of psychedelic revolution a pillar of strength with Timothy Leary & Charles Olson, companioned Kerouac & William Burroughs in Tanger, was one of the first American poets to make modern passage to India in early ’60s accompanying Gary Snyder & Allen Ginsbrg, studied Sarod, Banjo & Guitar, read poetry in Chicago & at Harvard Columbia Princeton Yale & New York’s St. Marks Poetry Project, survived Speed & Junk Hells, sang in jail at anti-war protest & political convention occasions, was published in historic Beatitude & Don Allen Anthologies of New American Poetry, played Self in early underground Robert Frank Movies, travelled with Dylan Rolling Thunder Review, farmed solitary upstate New York ten years organic & herculean, fed and nursed decades of poetry families. An experienced Buddhist sitter & Vajrayana meditation practitioner, his Dharma name is “Ocean of Generosity.” After 20 years of shy genius this first poem book’s published on earth.

Allen Ginsberg
Aug. 27, 1978

Above shot is from the upcoming film “Howl” featuring Aaron Tveit as Orlovsky and James Franco as Ginsberg.