For 35 years, Peter Haley has been the Pied Piper of opera in the Capital Region.  As founder of the 400-member Siena Opera Club, he teaches classes on the art form, leads dozens of bus trips every year to performances across the east coast, and organizes European tours. Preparing for it all means long days immersed in music and logistical details. And Haley doesn’t even get to take the summers off. That’s because the...

violinist Matt Albert and clarinetist Michael MaccaferriJennifer Higdon – winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Music – just had her latest major premiere, “On A Wire.” It’s a concerto for the contemporary ensemble Eighth Blackbird and was premiered last week with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and conductor Robert Spano, who’s been a longtime champion of Higdon. The performers have already...

He’s the principal cellist in the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, but Jeffrey Krieger is widely known in new music circles as an electric cellist. For some 20 years now he’s played the electrified instrument and collaborated extensively with a wide range of composers in the creation of multimedia performance works involving computer and videos. A 1993 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts made possible extensive...

Within moments after the curtain rises on Jorge Martin’s “Before Night Falls,” the hero collapses into his deathbed.  It’s an obvious allusion to all those consumptive operatic heroines of the romantic era and reinforces why the memoir of Cuban writer Renaldo Arenas was such a good choice for a staged adaptation. The Fort Worth Opera premiered the work in two performances at Bass Hall, as part of an early summer...

Love and classical music were both in abundance at the commitment ceremony of Karl Brosch and Ralph Thomas on Saturday June 5 in Manchester, Vermont.  Performing at the event was a 70-piece orchestra and 30-member chorus, all friends of the long-time couple.  Myra Herron tells the full story at at  www.HudsonSounds.org.

Composer Melissa Dunphy, a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, has made a choral work out of a World War II veteran’s testimony on marriage equality. The 86-year old Philip Spooner spoke to a committee of the state legislature in Maine on April 22, 2009: Here’s Dunphy’s musical setting “What Do You Think I Fought For At Omaha Beach?” performed by the Simon Carrington Chamber...

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...

Peter Orlovsky published five books of poems in his own right, but is famous for having been the long-time lover of one of the 20th century’s greatest poets, Allen Ginsberg. 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...

Fort Worth Texas might be the most conservative area of the country after Orange County California. Last June one of its few gay bars, the Rainbow Lounge, was raided by members of the Fort Worth Police Department and Texas Alcoholic Beverages Commission. Seven people were arrested for drunkenness, though numerous reports say that the individuals were pulled from the crowd randomly and violently.  A 26-year old man was hospitalized...

For 33 years composer Gerald Busby has been a resident at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan.  That means he’s pretty much outlasted every other artist who lived there or just passed through, from his mentor Virgil Thomson to Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen, and Sid Vicious. Journalists and authors love to write about the famous hotel and Gerald is always there to give them a good interview. He’s...