Jessie Montgomery’s Rounds is a testament to her impressive compositional chops. Let’s have more from her here, and often.
Classical Music
Book Review: Steve Reich’s “Conversations” — Something Special
At its best, Steve Reich’s Conversations is illuminating and engaging, an honest discussion of the creative process by one of the major composers of our times.
Opera Album Review: An Opera by a Scandalous — and Murdered — Composer Is Brought Back to Life
Alessandro Stradella’s Loving and Pretending (caa. 1676) gets a lively, precise, and characterful performance in this world-premiere recording.
Opera Preview: A Rachmaninoff Triple-Header!
Odyssey Opera, and major singers from Ukraine and Russia, bring the great Russian composers’s three one-act operas to Jordan Hall on Sunday, September 25.
Opera Review: Saint-Saëns’s “Phryné” — Short and Witty, and Rediscovered
A one-hour opera that the world forgot — a world-premiere recording of Saint-Saëns’s Phryné.
Opera Album Review: From Fascist Italy — With Love?
An opera from Fascist Italy, Gino Marinuzzi’s Palla de’ Mozzi receives a splendid world-premiere recording. Should you listen despite its pedigree?
Opera Album Review: Richard Flury, A Swiss Composer You Should Know About
A world-premiere recording of Richard Flury’s fascinating 1935 opera about love, deceit, and the possibility of forgiveness.
Classical Album Review: Nico Muhly’s “Stranger” — Searching for Commonalities
Nico Muhly’s writing in Stranger is of a type of post-Minimalism: often pulsing (or undulating) and rhythmically driven, though anything but harmonically simplistic.
Classical Music Album Review: John Corigliano’s “To Music”
A serving of the essence of the music of John Corigliano: a blend of old and new, radical and traditional that has made him such a singular force in American music over the last fifty-plus years.
Classical Album Review: Florence Price’s “Scenes in Tin Can Alley”
Symphonic music wasn’t composer Florence Price’s strong suit. Rather, she was much more at home working in smaller forms or for her own instrument.