journal.nonesuch.com

Nonesuch Events This Weekend

Here is our weekly list of just some of the many events going on across the globe this weekend featuring Nonesuch artists:

London Sinfonietta, led by Diego Masson, will perform John Adams's Chamber Symphony tomorrow night at Esplanade Concert Hall in Singapore in its second of two performances at the 2008 Singapore Arts Festival. Also on tonight's program: Piazzolla's Tango Seis, Takemitsu's Rain Coming, and Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale. Info: singaporeartsfest.com.

Also tomorrow night, the Holland Symfonia, led by Henrik Schaefer, performs works from South America, including Adams's orchestrations of Piazzolla's La Mufa, Tango and Todo Buenos Aires. The Symfonia continues its South American program Sunday night with more works by Piazzolla. Info: hollandsymfonia.com.

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The Black Keys' tour of New Zealand and Australia winds down this weekend, jumping from the eastern to western coasts of Australia. Saturday, the band will play at the Manning Bar in Camperdown, Sydney (manningbar.com), then fly to Perth for a show at Metro Fremantle on Sunday, before heading home.

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T Bone Burnett continues to cross the country with Robert Plant and Alison Krauss as part of the Raising Sands tour. This weekend it brings them to the Red Rocks Amphitheatre outside Denver, Colorado. Info: redrocksonline.com.

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Bill Frisell has had to cancel his appearance tonight at the 8 Days in June festival in Detroit, Michigan, due to a family illness. For information on refunds and ticket exchanges, call the Orchestra Hall box office at 313-576-5111.

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Emmylou Harris played the second of two nights yesterday at New York City's The Town Hall and heads out to Long Island tonight for the Opening Night Gala performance the The Planting Fields Arboretum's summer season of concerts in Oyster Bay, New York (fotapresents.org). She'll then perform at the Wolf Trap Filene Center in Vienna, Virginia, on Sunday (wolftrap.org).

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The Brad Mehldau Trio joins the festivities for the annual JVC Jazz Festival New York with a performance Sunday night in Carnegie Hall's intimate Zankel Hall. Info: festivalnetwork.com.

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After a rocking performance last night at the Birchmere in Alexandria, Virginia, broadcast live on npr.org and now available at npr.org/music, Orchestra Baobab heads up to the Boston area to play the Somerville Theatre tomorrow night. (somervilletheatreonline.com). "There are few summer sounds more breezily soulful than those wafting north from Cuba," says the Boston Herald, "unless they make their way here via a detour through Africa." The Herald calls the band's sound "an infectious mix of high life, Afro-Cuban rhythms, and Congolese rumba that made it legendary in West Africa."

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Tonight, Nicholas Payton joins drummer Roy Hanes and fellow Birds of a Feather participants Donald Harrison on sax, Christian McBride on bass, and Dave Kikoski on piano, paying tribute to John Coltrane, for the finale concert in the Gene Harris Jazz Festival in Boise, Idaho. The concert will take place in the Morrison Center at Boise State University. Info: boiseevents.com.

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Punch Brothers perform at the Sheridan Opera House for the closing-day events of the 35th annual Telluride Bluegrass Festival in Telluride, Colorado, on Sunday. Tickets and info: bluegrass.com/telluride.

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This weekend, the Cincinnati Conservatory at the University of Cincinnati will conclude its weeklong Music 08 festival, showcasing new works and masterworks of the 20th and 21st centuries. Frederic Rzewski and Steve Reich are guest composers at the event, leading master classes today and tomorrow. The festival's culminating events include an all-Reich concert tomorrow night in the school's Corbett Auditorium, featuring Cello Counterpoint and Music for 18 Musicians, and a Sunday afternoon performance of Double Sextet by eighth blackbird, which held a master class yesterday. Info and tickets: ccm.uc.edu.

Reich's New York Counterpoint will be on the program tonight in the London Sinfonietta's first of two performances for the Singapore Arts Festival at Esplanade Concert Hall, in which the music will be accompanied by original visuals by video art collective Flat-e. Info: singaporeartsfest.com.

Also tonight, pianist Stephen Drury joins performers from the Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice for Reich's Sextet at New England Conservatory's Jordan Hall in Boston. Info: sicpp.org.

Adams, Reich, Glass, Frisell Music to Be Featured at 8 Days in June Festival

Works by John Adams, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Frederic Rzewski, Bill Frisell, John Zorn, John Cage meet the music of Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Beethoven at the Detroit Symphony Orchestra's second annual 8 Days in June music festival, which kicks off tonight. It's a multidisciplinary affair aiming to examine the relationship between music and the explosive changes of the 20th and 21st centuries and harness the "The Power of Change."

Philip Glass's music provides the score for images of nature photographer Frans Lanting in the film Life: A Journey Through Time on Sunday, Day Two of the Festival, titled "The Changing Earth."

Tuesday, Day Four, titled "Patterns and Structure," examines how simple repetitive patterns, in both nature and music, form intricate structures, showing beauty and complexity from apparent disorder. The evening's program, which Detroit Free Press music writer Mark Stryker says "promises to be one of the festival highlights," includes performances of Adams's Shaker Loops, Rzewski's Les Mouton de Panurge, and, "most notable" for Stryker, Reich's "profound masterpiece," Different Trains.

The next Friday, June 20, is Day Seven, "Spontaneous Creation," which concludes with a concert by the Bill Frisell Quintet---Tony Scherr, Rudy Royston, Ron Miles, Chris Cheek---with violinist Mark Fewer guitarist Stephen Stubb as guests. "Frisell's quintet is the guitarist's best band," says Stryker, "showcasing his eclectic spirit ranging from dreamy pastoralism to aggressive post-bop."

For all the details on the Festival, visit 8daysinjune.com. For the Detroit Free Press preview, visit freep.com.

Frederic Rzewski's 70th Birthday Celebrated with Concerts at Gilmore Festival and Carnegie Hall

April 13 marked the 70th birthday of composer Frederic Rzewski, who, in 2002, performed his own works for piano on a seven-disc collection, Rzewski Plays Rzewski: Piano Works, 1975-1999, released by Nonesuch. This week, the composer will celebrate with three special concert events: tonight and tomorrow as part of the renowned Gilmore Keyboard Festival and this Thursday in Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall in New York.

Included on the program tonight at the Dalton Center Recital Hall in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and in Zankel Hall on Thursday, is a two-piano version, which Rzewski will perform with Stephen Drury, of "Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues," part of the North American Ballads the composer plays on the Nonesuch collection, as well as the premiere of Natural Things, co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall and the Gilmore Festival, for which the pianists will be joined by Opus 21.

The Zankel Hall performance is part of Carnegie's Making Music series and will be moderated by Ara Guzelimian, the Provost and Dean of the Juilliard School. For the Gilmore, the composer will play an additional solo recital of his work tomorrow afternoon at the Wellspring Theater at Kalamazoo's Epic Center. Included on that program are Mayn Yingele and De Profundis, both of which are part of the Nonesuch boxed set, as well as the newer piece War Songs.

In the New York Times, Matthew Gurewitsch writes of the 2002 collection that, for all of Rzewski's "anarchic streak," both humorous and political, "what emerges above all is a picture of a pianist enamored of his instrument as handed down by the master builders of the 19th century."

As Daniel R. Gustin, the Gilmore Festival's director, tells Gurewitsch:

Rzewski is in the line of the great pianist-composers like Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn ... He's a bit of a maverick, which is fun, and it's hard to pin him down as to style and approach. But his piano works connect to the great pianistic tradition.

To read the New York Times article, visit nytimes.com.

For information on the Gilmore Festival programs, visit thegilmoreiscoming.com; for the Zankel Hall program, visit carnegiehall.org.

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Click here to add the seven-disc Rzewski Plays Rzewski boxed set to your Shopping Cart for $44. (MP3 downloads for this set are not currently available from the Nonesuch Store.)