Clint Borzoni began studying music at age seven and wrote his first composition at age eleven. Now 29 years old, he’s composed more than 40 pieces, including a piano concerto, percussion quartet, a couple of sting quartets and chamber orchestra works and loads of songs. A New York City resident, he received his bachelors and masters degrees at CUNY.  His musical theater work “My Life as a Bald Soprano”...

In December the Manhattan School of Music gave three staged performances of Lee Hoiby’s “Summer & Smoke,” a 1971 adaptation of a Tennessee Williams piece with a libretto by Lanford Wilson. Anthony Tommasini in the Times gave a very positive review, especially of the work referring to the “sure dramatic pacing and understated expressivity, in music admirable for its directness and melodic grace”...

For singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright’s return to The Egg in Albany tonight, every audience member gets a close up view.  That’s thanks to the visual component of the concert’s first half, a video creation by Douglas Gordon. But don’t expect a live action shot of Wainwright on a big screen, like at an arena rock show. Gordon is an acclaimed artist who works in large scale video formats and he’s created a very long...

Eugenics — the science of improving a human population by controlled breeding to increase desirable characteristics — is a central theme in “Cold Spring,” which plays Friday and Saturday nights (12/3-4/10) in the EMPAC theater in Troy. Creator Sean Griffin chose the title as a reference to the studies in human potential conducted in Cold Spring Harbor, Suffolk County, during the early part of the...

As one of the world’s leading opera directors Francesca Zambello’s career has taken her around the globe, jetting to such illustrious houses as La Scala, Covenant Garden and the Metropolitan Opera.  But as the new artistic director of Glimmerglass Opera, she’s been spending much of the fall driving herself around the Northeast, talking up the company with potential patrons and friends, from the Finger Lakes in New York...

Bernstein’s “A Quiet Place” New York City Opera October 30, 2010 “Bernstein’s Trouble in Houston” was how one headline put it after the 1983 premiere at the Houston Grand Opera of “A Quiet Place,” the dark, family drama that was conceived as a sequel to his effervescent 1952 one-act “Trouble in Tahiti.”  When George Steel announced a revival for his second season as general and artistic director of the...

Music and food have always gone together well, but seldom have they been presented as equals on a stage. Walking the Dog Theatre is serving up just such a combination with “Bon Appetit!” An original theatrical, musical and culinary tribute to Julia Child, the show is produced in association with Diamond Opera Theater. It plays at the Basilica Industria in Hudson for eight performances through Sept. 24. Every performance...

Most music lovers are interested in composers’ notes, but Vivian Perlis is obsessed with their words.  Interviewing all manner of figures in American music over the past forty years, she’s been a leader in the once emerging, now established field of “oral history.” Perlis’ ten-year association with the late Aaron Copland resulted in their co-authoring his two-volume autobiography.  She’ll give a talk about the...

The name of the opera is “The Distant Sound.”  Yet the new production at Bard College’s SummerScape, which opens Friday night, will probably focus on plenty more than just sound.  If it holds true to the festival’s recent track record, it will also be spectacular to look at. Last year’s staging of “The Huguenots” was a feast of visual wonder with enormous set pieces, imaginative costumes and, most memorably,...

The late composer Aaron Copland created a signature American sound in just a few distinctive orchestral works, including Appalachian Spring, Rodeo and Fanfare for the Common Man.  Pungent excerpts from these pieces are a part of every presidential inauguration. But his catalog is deep and not everything in it was one for the ages.  His only full length opera “The Tender Land,” which is currently playing at Glimmerglass...