The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus with music director David Robertson will premiere Meredith Monk’s newest orchestral work in a one-night-only performance on Saturday, March 13. Along with the as-yet-untitled piece, the program will feature Monk’s 3-minute hit “Panda Chant” (1984) and another work for orchestra and chorus, “Night” (1996/2005).  Monk and members of her vocal ensemble...

Except for my ears, there’s nothing gay here (at least as far as I know). These are my reviews for the Times Union (Albany, NY) from last weekend. I’ve decided to start posting more of this sort of thing, since these assignments are what can keep me from providing more original content on here. Daniel Bernard Roumain & The Mission January 22, 2010, The Egg, Albany Daniel Bernard Roumain, also known as DBR,...

Mark Adamo’s “Late Victorians” comes from the large body of musical works that somehow or other address AIDS.  Composers — primarily if not exclusively gay composers — have been grappling with the subject for 25 years now.  According to my research for the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, the first work in the genre was “Inquiries of Hope: Ten Poems of Kirby Congdon” (1984) by the late Louis Weingarden. ...

A FULL EVENING OF ORCHESTRAL MUSIC BY HENRY COWELL When’s the last time that’s happened anywhere? Leave it to Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra to make it happen. 8 p.m. Friday January 29, Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center (pre-concert talk at 6:45 p.m.) The program: Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 3 (1944) Atlantis (1931) ( NY Premiere ) Variations for Orchestra (1959) Symphony No. 2, “Anthropos”...

The contemporary performing arts in New York have no better friend than GWEN DEELY. She’s as devoted and busy an audience member as they come.  (All the more so, since she’s got a day job and doesn’t get free tickets like us critics.) I visit her in Manhattan regularly and she always gives me a report of the great events she’s attended. This year she seemed to have had a lot of peak experiences, including her own...

Composers keep score. That’s actually a pun, because “score” is a term for a piece of music when it’s written-out on paper. But composers do keep count and not just of beats. More often than not, they also keep a tally on how many times their music gets played each year.  That’s especially the case when it comes to orchestral performances, because if a conductor leads a full orchestra in your music then it means...

“Those gay composers sure write beautiful music.” Those were a friend’s first words to me during an intermission at a concert late this past spring at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall.  He could have been speaking of so many different folks, such as the Americans Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, or Leonard Bernstein, to name just a few. Or from the classics there’s Tchaikovsky or Handel, for that matter.  But on this...

Perhaps it’s all because of his iconic name but composer John Adams has a knack for making headline works, pieces that become the talk of a season. With a title like “Nixon in China,” his first opera was guaranteed to garner attention back in 1987. It didn’t hurt that the work itself was colorful, humorous and insightful.Adams has continued in the so-called CNN-school of American opera with “The...

Typical of a major conductor in our jet set age, Marin Alsop, who appears with the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center on Wednesday, has bases of operation located in a variety of far flung cities. First is Baltimore, where in September she begins her second year as the music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. With her 2005 appointment to the post she became the first female leader of a...

The late great gay poet Alan Ginsberg channeled a ferocious anger and fear over nuclear proliferation into his 1978 epic poem “Plutonian Ode.” Composer Philip Glass, who was a friend and East Village neighbor of Ginsberg, responds with a similar urgency in his Symphony No. 6 “Plutonian Ode,” a mercurial score that’s nearly an hour-long (Orange Mountain Music). Soprano Lauren Flanigan gives the searing vocal part...