Choral

Back to the Future: The New Spirituality of Joep Franssens

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“Our new century is the most exciting time to be making and listening to music.” That’s the bold statement Frank J. Oteri makes in an article that appeared last week at NewMusicBox. He characterizes our hyper-connected twenty-first century world as a place where boundaries disappear. Here is an excerpt: For listeners, there’s more music to hear than ever before–and it’s happening all over the world. Of course, it always has, but nowadays, it’s not limited to …

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Remembering Sir Neville Marriner

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Every great conductor started out as an accomplished instrumentalist. Look at the biography of Sir Neville Marriner, who passed away yesterday at the age of 92, and you’ll be reminded of this truism. In the 1950s, Marriner performed as a violinist in two celebrated orchestras: the Philharmonia and the London Symphony. For 13 years, he served as second violinist of the Martin String Quartet. He first picked up a baton around age 40. …

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Daniel Stepner Plays Solo Bach

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On Monday, we ventured into the monumental preludes and fugues of J.S. Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. Let’s finish the week with an excerpt from Daniel Stepner’s 2013 Centaur Records release of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin. Stepner offers period performances of these works, tuning to the lowered A of Bach’s time, and using three fine old instruments: a 1641 Italian Amati violin, a 1740s German Klotz, and a 1693 Stradivari. The recording was made over the course 23 years, between …

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Psalm 90: Charles Ives’ Time-Altering Swan Song

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When you think of Charles Ives (1874-1954), the visionary experimental composer and New England insurance executive who assembled shocking, never-before-imagined sonic collages, what music comes to mind? Probably the enigmatic Unanswered Question. Perhaps the dense, American folk-song-laced orchestral tone poems or the harmonically advanced Concord Sonata. But beyond all of this lies another side of Ives. By the age of 14, he was an organist of immense technical skill. (At 17, Ives described his fiendishly difficult, …

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Newly Released: Robert Shaw’s Live Recording of Beethoven’s Ninth

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This performance is one of those in which all of the participants were playing for the sake of the music and were caught up in a vortex of musical union and humanity, the likes of which you just don’t encounter very often, if ever, in a lifetime. This is how Robert Woods, founding producer of the Telarc record label, described a rare archival recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, performed by Robert Shaw and the …

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The 2016 Classical Grammys

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Here is an overview of the 2016 Grammy Awards in the classical categories, announced earlier this week. The list is dominated by twentieth century music, both familiar and obscure. Several of the albums are live concert recordings. Best Orchestral Performance “Shostakovich: Under Stalin’s Shadow — Symphony No. 10,” Andris Nelsons, conductor (Boston Symphony Orchestra) This is Andris Nelsons’ inaugural recording as Music Director of the Boston Symphony. The album includes Shostakovich’s Symphony No. …

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Remembering Composer Bern Herbolsheimer

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(Photo above by Rosetta Greek Photography) This Sunday, Seattle’s musical community will pause to remember the life of one of its most esteemed composers. American composer Bern Herbolsheimer passed away on January 13 following a battle with cancer. He was 67. Herbolsheimer served on the faculty of Cornish College and the University of Washington. His works include a Symphony which was premiered in 1989 by conductor Kenneth Jean and the Florida Symphony Orchestra, two …

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