journal.nonesuch.com

Philip Glass Talks with Paul Simon at BAM for Conclusion of Simon Celebration

Tonight at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Paul Simon and Philip Glass come together at the BAM Harvey Theater for a conversation about art, life, and the creative process that will include questions from the audience as well. It is the culmination of Love in Hard Times: The Music of Paul Simon, BAM's monthlong celebration of the famed singer-songwriter that included David Byrne's unforgettable rendition of "You Can Call Me Al" and "I Know What I Know" for the April 9-13 events, Under African Skies. For tickets to tonight's BAMtalk, visit bam.org.

Laurie Anderson Begin Barbican Residency, Appears on BBC Radio

Laurie Anderson kicks off her four-night residency at the Barbican Theatre in London tonight. The shows are part of the Barbican's bite08 festival of music, dance, and visual art taking place over the next month, as well as the Spring 08 Contemporary Events series, which also includes a sold-out performance by Toumani Diabate at the LSO St. Luke's this Friday and the UK premiere of Philip Glass's Waiting for the Barbarians in June.

Before tonight's show at the Barbican, Laurie will stop by the BBC studios for an appearance on the Nemone radio show, which begins 1 PM GMT on BBC Radio 6 Music. To listen live online, visit bbc.co.uk. You can also listen again to the show online for the following week.

Laurie made an earlier appearance on BBC radio yesterday on the Radio 4 program Woman's Hour. You can listen to that now at bbc.co.uk/radio4.

Nonesuch Events This Weekend

Below is information on just some of the many events going on this weekend across the globe featuring Nonesuch artists. Enjoy!

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Violinist Leila Josefowicz will join the Saint Louis Symphony, led by conductor Marin Alsop, for three performances of John Adams's The Dharma at Big Sur this weekend at Powell Hall in St. Louis. Also tonight, the Bilbao Symphony Orchestra led by Raymond Leppard will perform Adams's Violin Concerto at the Euskalduna Palace in Bilbao, Spain, featuring violinist Chlöe Hanslip, and the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale RAI led by Trevor Pinnock will perform the composer's 1990 orchestration of Liszt's The Black Gondola, in Turin, Italy.

Saturday night, the San Francisco Ballet presents the Mark Morris Dance Group's Joyride, featuring Adams's Son of Chamber Symphony, at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, as part of the continuing New Works Festival.

Adams's Short Ride in a Fast Machine gets three playings this weekend: Saturday night at the Saenger Theater in Mobile, Alabama, by Scott Speck and the Mobile Symphony, and Bloomington High School in Bloomington, Indiana, by Jose Valencia and the Musical Arts Youth Orchestra; and Sunday night at Royal Albert Hall, London, by Mark Gooding and the Harrow Young Musicians Philharmonic.

More information: boosey.com.

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Kronos Quartet plays the last of three performances at the Mondavi Center at the University of California, Davis, tonight: John Cage's Thirty Pieces for String Quartet with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Tickets: mondaviarts.org.

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Laurie Anderson will bring Homeland to the Moscow International Performing Arts Center in Russia on Saturday. On Sunday night, Laurie will join the weekend-long Symposium on Sound, a gathering of scientists, performers, and artists, at Leiden University in the Netherlands, for a discussion of the event's theme of mutual influence between art and science, especially as it relates to sound. Info: veenfabriek.nl.

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T Bone Burnett continues his tour with Robert Plant and Alison Krauss at New Orleans' famed Jazz & Heritage Festival, aka Jazz Fest. The three are scheduled to take the Acura Stage this afternoon at 3:30 PM. Next, they'll head to Birmingham, Alabama, where they'll play the BJCC Arena Saturday night. Tickets: nojazzfest.com (4/25); bjcc.org (4/26).

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Bill Frisell closes out his two week residency at New York's Village Vanguard with performances all weekend. Playing with Bill are Chris Cheek on sax, Ron Miles on trumpet, Tony Scherr on bass, and Rudy Royston on drums. Tickets: villagevanguard.com.

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Satyagraha, Philip Glass's 1980 opera centered around Mahatma Gandhi's early years in South Africa, continues tonight at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The performance is sold out. More information: metoperafamily.org.

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Richard Goode will perform a free concert in New York City as part of the annual Free for All at Town Hall concert series. See the post in today's Nonesuch Journal for more information.

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Emmylou Harris takes the stage at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center in downtown Nashville tonight for Premiere Evening, an annual fund-raising event to benefit the Center's educational and cultural programming. Tickets: tpac.org.

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k.d. lang's continues the Australian leg of her Watershed tour at the Entertainment Center in Adelaide Saturday night. Tickets: theaec.net.

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Brad Mehldau is in Quebec, Canada, tonight for a solo show at the Palais Montcalm. He returns to the States on Saturday for a performance with the trio with whom he recorded the new album Live at the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH, and a Sunday night show at the Annenberg Center's Zellerbach Theater in Philadelphia. Tickets: palaismontcalm.ca (4/25); hop.dartmouth.edu (4/26); pennpresents.org (4/27).

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Youssou N'Dour will perform a special benefit concert tonight at New York's intimate venue Joe's Pub as part of a fund-raising effort for the Youssou N'Dour Foundation and his worldwide advocacy efforts. The acoustic set will be modeled on the smaller sets he leads at his club in Dakar. Tickets: joespub.com.

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Randy Newman will play a solo date tonight at the Riley Center at Mississippi State University's Meridian Campus. Tickets: msurileycenter.com.

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Nicholas Payton stays close to home for New Orleans' Jazz Fest. He and his quintet will take the stage in the WWOZ Jazz Tent at 4:05 PM on Sunday. Among the other performers at this year's festival are Stevie Wonder and Al Green, as well as Robert Plant and Alison Krauss with T Bone Burnett (see above). Tickets: nojazzfest.com.

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Steve Reich's Eight Lines will be performed by Ensemble Intercontemporain led by Ludovic Morlot tonight at Cité de la musique, Salle des concerts, in Paris.

Reich's Desert Music, will presented at the University of California, Berkeley, Saturday, as Drumming will be performed by percussionist Colin Currie at the Concert Hall in Perth, Scotland. Currie earned four stars in the Herald (UK) for his performance there earlier this week of Reich's Music for Pieces of Wood that "mesmerised." Also Saturday, the Smith Quartet brings the Triple Quartet to the Jacqueline du Pre Music Building in Oxford, England.

On Sunday, Reich's Cello Counterpoint will be performed at the Purcell Room in London by Endymion and his Vermont Counterpoint can be heard at Ford Hall at Ithaca College, with Melissa Wertheimer on flute.

More information: boosey.com

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The national tour of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, based on the 2005 Broadway production helmed by John Doyle, began its run at Chicago's Cadillac Palace Theatre early this week. Performances continue there through May 4. Tickets: sweeneytoddtour.com

SF Chronicle: Adams Piece "Lived Up to the Buzz" in Mark Morris Dance with "Dazzlingly Sophisticated Musicality"

The San Francisco Ballet celebrates its 75th anniversary season in 2008, and the final programs are anything but a look backwards. The season comes to a close with the forward-looking New Works Festival, which began on Tuesday of this week with the first of three programs to run through May 6.

Program A includes works by choreographers Paul Taylor, Christopher Wheeldon, and Yuri Possokhov, the last featuring the late Indian film composer Rahul Dev Burman's "Aaj Ki Raat" (Tonight's the Night) that Osvaldo Golijov arranged for Kronos Quartet's Caravan . The San Francisco Chronicle's dance correspondent Rachel Howard calls it the "improbable triumph of the evening," with Possokhov pulling a number disparate pieces together "with theatrical flair."

Program B debuted on Wednesday, with works by Stanton Welch, Julia Adam, James Kudelka, and Mark Morris. The last, titled Joyride, features John Adams's Son of a Chamber Symphony, co-commissioned by Morris and Alarm Will Sound, which gave the piece its premiere performance last fall. For this week's opening, the composer conducted, and, says the Chronicle's Rachel Howard, "it lived up to the buzz."
About Morris's piece, Howard writes:

if you appreciate a ballet that offers dazzlingly sophisticated musicality, that takes classical attention to form and channels it into a modern ethos---if you cherish a ballet sure to show you something new every time you see it---then you could hardly do better than Mark Morris' Joyride.

Summing up the evening's program as a whole, Howard finds that it "fulfilled the festival's larger potential: revealing the many faces of ballet today."

To read the full Chronicle review of Program A, click here, and of Program B, click here.

The festival's third program, Program C, premiered last night and includes Jorma Elo's Double Evil, set to Philip Glass's Concerto Fantasy for Two Timpanists and Orchestra and Vladimir Martynov's Come In!, the latter which Gidon Kremer and the Kremerata Baltica recorded on the album Silencio in 2000.

For complete program and schedule information, visit sfballet.org.

Celebrate Brooklyn! Announces 30th Season

Philip Glass and Christina Courtin will be among the artists participating in the 30th season of Celebrate Brooklyn!, the series of free concerts at the Prospect Park Bandshell in Brooklyn, New York. The season kicks off June 12 with an opening-night performance by Isaac Hayes. The Glass concert is scheduled for July 25; Courtin shares a bill with The Knights on August 1.

BrooklynVegan reports that also included among the broad range of artists scheduled to perform this summer are Gilberto Gil, Feist, Carolina Chocolate Drops, Cold War Kids, Brazilian Girls, Beth Orton, and Deerfhoof. Check in with briconline.org/celebrate for more information throughout the season.

Greenwood's "There Will Be Blood" Makes Alex Ross's "Soundtrack to the City"

On the same day Alex Ross, the New Yorker music critic, enjoyed the Stephen Colbert treatment as a guest on the Colbert Report, Gothamist published an interview with Ross, in which he discusses his new book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century.

In the interview, Ross is asked what he would recommend to someone just learning to explore classical music. To get the full experience suggests both attending a live concert and buying a few representative CDs, including Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's album of Bach cantatas, BWV 82 and 199, and Steve Reich and Musicians playing Reich's Music for 18 Musicians.

As for his current "soundtrack to the city," Ross cites two film scores: Jonny Greenwood's There Will Be Blood and Philip Glass's Koyaanisqatsi.

To read the interview, visit gothamist.com. To read more of what Alex Ross has to say about Greenwood's score, click here.

NY Times Recommends Mega-Concert with Glass's "Dracula" Suite

New York's Kaufman Center recently underwent a $17 million renovation project to revitalize the building and update its Merkin Concert Hall. The Center unveiled the redesigned space earlier this month with an Opening Night Celebration, and this Monday, Merkin Hall offers a free Grand Piano Marathon "mega-concert." The New York Times recommends the six-hour event and counts as a highlight a performance by Michael Riesman, the music director of the Philip Glass Ensemble, of a suite from Glass's Dracula soundtrack, the full score of which Kronos Quartet recorded for Nonesuch in 1999.

To see the starred listing in the Times, visit nytimes.com. For the complete performance schedule, visit kaufman-center.org.

Celebrating the Multiplicity of Modern Music

Just in time for this month's multi-dimensional Sydney Festival of music, dance, theatre, and more, the Sydney Morning Herald recently reprinted an essay by composer Nico Muhly published last fall in the Guardian, asserting that the cross-pollination between pop/rock and contemporary classical music needn't resort to anything as metaphorically contorted as the bending, breaking, or busting of genres at all. Rather, writes Muhly: "The best sort of interchange between experimental classical music and experimental rock and pop consists of a shared dialogue with the goal of making music."

Muhly points to the era of compositional experimentation of the '60s and '70s by leading figures like Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Terry Riley as purveyors of "the productive intersection between notated and non-notated music" that would soon spread beyond the "classical" world. In the work of this vanguard could be seen "classically trained composers relinquishing control, backing off of the laser-like precision of Stravinskian detail and replacing it with a type of communal music-making more commonly found in rock bands."

Citing artists like Radiohead, Björk, and Sufjan Stevens (the latter two contributors to the Nonesuch Tribute to Joni Mitchell) as the heirs to this new mode of composition, Muhly points, among other things, to Björk's inclusion of the pipa on her latest release, Volta, not as some simplistic East-West "fusion" but rather as just one more component in her expansive creative palette. (Similarly, pioneering composer Terry Riley's Cusp of Magic, written for Kronos Quartet and pipa virtuoso Wu Man, brings together Chinese lullabies and digital audio samples of musical toys, so that, in the composer's words, "Western musical themes might be projected with an Eastern accent and vice-versa." Nonesuch will release the Kronos/Wu Man recording of the piece, pictured above right, on February 5.)

In Stevens's case, the singer-songwriter "makes active references to the American minimal tradition (Reich, Glass, Adams) in his music." His breakout album Illinois even includes a lengthy musical reference "lifted almost directly from Adams's Common Tones in Simple Time," writes Muhly. "But, Stevens has a more complicated compositional process than just borrowing." Referencing "an incredibly successful moment" in one song, Muhly says "it works because Stevens has harnessed his minimalist pattern-based energies and sent them straight up from the earth to the sky."

For Muhly, the emotional core is precisely where musical cross-pollination should begin, writing that it

is best achieved when it bypasses thought and operates through the nervous system, the spine and the fingertips ... Modern musicians can pick and choose what goes into their music. The literal crossing-over is already done. It is simply a matter of a making a plan and not giving it a name except your own.

To read the complete article, visit smh.com.au or arts.guardian.co.uk.

Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass Portraits by Chuck Close in 2008 Tacoma Exhibit

The Tacoma Art Museum will present the exhibition A Couple of Ways of Doing Something: Photographs by Chuck Close, Poems by Bob Holman, March 1–June 15, 2008 . The exhibit includes portraits by Close of such esteemed artists as Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, and Robert Wilson, among many others (including the self-portrait at right), along with praise poems written in conjunction with Close's work by Holman, the founder of the Bowery Poetry Club.

For more information, read the preview of the exhibit in artdaily.org or visit tacomaartmuseum.org.

NY Times: See Philip Glass's "Einstein" and Let Go

"Einstein on the Beach changed my life. Everything I thought musical theater was, abruptly wasn’t." So writes New York Times music critic Bernard Holland in yesterday's paper, previewing this Thursday's concert version of the seminal 1976 Philip Glass / Robert Wilson collaboration. The performance by the Philip Glass Ensemble, at Carnegie Hall, will be the first time it has been done live in 15 years.

In the article, Holland describes Glass's music and Wilson's direction in vivid detail. But mostly, he recommends not spending too much time trying to parse every detail and figure out what it's really all about. In Einstein, Glass uses considerable repetition to tell an utterly non-linear story, or non-story, full of unexpected stops and starts.

The non-traditional structure of the piece has proved exceptionally difficult for classically trained musicians to play. Musicians talk "of complete mental exhaustion after dealing with this music. Not even the best symphony orchestras do it well." And so, Glass has looked to his own Ensemble—"instrumentalists and singers with one foot in the Juilliard School and the other in rock music"—to perform the piece as it should be done. Led by Michael Riesman, these musicians are well versed in the "intractable repetitions" found both in rock and in Glass's music. What's more, they have "the patience to deal with both. A certain empty-headedness comes into play, but an exalted empty-headedness, actually a form of high intelligence."

That very same sort of intelligence is what Holland recommends audiences strive for when approaching Einstein. And he does recommend it:

Einstein on the Beach is the ideal entertainment for people smart enough not to think too much. Relevance, allusion, historical significance, metaphor, symbol and myth may make the inquiring mind go round, but too much meaning can also clog the arteries ... Look at it (if you have the chance) and listen to it. Einstein may well be speaking volumes to your subconscious without your knowing. Ask your subconscious if you must, but it will probably tell you to mind your own business.

To read Holland's article, visit nytimes.com. For ticket information on this Thursday's performance, visit carnegiehall.org. For more on the 1993 Nonesuch recording of the piece, click here.

David Byrne, Laurie Anderson in "New York Noise"

Paula Court, the photographer for the famed New York performance space The Kitchen, has released New York Noise, a new book of photos from the city's underground art scene during the economically down-and-out but culturally vibrant years of the '70s and '80s. Included in the book are photos of everyone from Madonna and Michael Stipe to Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and David Byrne. Also in the book are short essays by some of the artists whose portraits are featured inside, including Anderson and Byrne.

The Times (London) has put together a photo gallery along with a few of the texts from the book. Below are excerpts from David Byrne's note:

New York was a scary and legendary place—and downtown was like a Bohemian living museum, which was pretty thrilling for an aspiring artist and musician.

Legends walked the streets—well, from a skewed boho POV. It was all very new and exciting, at least for me—and it was incredibly funky, the sleaze and poverty were everywhere ... The cheapest hookers in town were on Chrystie Street, where Talking Heads once shared a loft. Now there’s a Whole Foods and luxury condos on the corner.

I’m not complaining or nostalgic for the bad old days—some things are genuinely better ... What might have gotten lost was that one could incubate one’s work inside the supportive bubble of a close and sometimes desperate community. Now that period of incubation is incredibly short, the chicks are thrown out of the nest immediately ...

And Laurie Anderson had this to say:

It was dark, dangerous, exciting. We knew we were creating a brand new art scene. We then watched that scene disappear. There weren’t boundaries or categories. We all worked on each other’s pieces and it didn’t matter that one was a dance-like thing and another was a sculpture-like thing.

At one point almost everyone I knew was working on an opera. You’d walk down the street and everyone you met would say, "How’s your opera?"

I guess opera was just a loose way to say big indefinable things. The definitions came later—applied, for example, by art schools to keep order in their curricula.

Read more and see some of Paula Court's photos from New York Noise: Art and Music from the New York Underground 1978-88 at timesonline.co.uk.

David Byrne, Philip Glass in New Robert Wilson Documentary DVD

In this week's Bay Windows out of New England, arts writer Brian Jewell reviews the new DVD release of Absolute Wilson, the 2006 documentary about visionary theater director Robert Wilson—"a wonderful introduction to Wilson’s fascinating life and work ... and a must-see for theater buffs." Featured in the film are Wilson collaborators David Byrne and Philip Glass, each of whom worked with the director on his 1984 multi-act piece the CIVIL warS. Resulting from that project were Glass's music for its "Rome Section," A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down, and Byrne's Knee Plays, which Nonesuch reissued last week on CD. Glass also collaborated famously with Wilson on the 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach (Nonesuch, 1993), selections from which will be performed live for the first time in 15 years by the Philip Glass Ensemble at Carnegie Hall next month.

Alex Ross and Ben Ratliff in a Slate Dialogue

This week in Slate, New Yorker classical music critic Alex Ross and New York Times jazz and pop critic Ben Ratliff engage in a Dialogue about music in and outside of the fields they generally cover. In a posting today, Ross tips his hat to jazz clubs for providing a more genuine, less pretentious space in which to enjoy music than the more reverent classical concert hall, where the composer's score is sacrosanct and even the moments for applause are prescribed. Still, he's happy to note a new trend in the classical world towards a more improvisatory experience, stemming in part from the predominance of composer-performers in post-War music:

In the new-music world, a not inconsiderable fraction of post-1945 music requires invention on the part of the performers. Since the minimalist revolution of the 1960s, when  Philip Glass and Steve Reich led their own ensembles, composer-performers have come to the fore ... The sharp division of labor between composer and performer is breaking down.

To read more of the Ross-Ratliff exchange, visit slate.com.

UK Poll: Philip Glass Among Greatest Living Geniuses

A new list of the world's 100 greatest living geniuses features an eclectic group, with Philip Glass, in the top ten, joining the ranks of Nelson Mandela, Stephen Hawking, and, yes, Simpsons creator Matt Groening. According to The Guardian, an international consulting firm compiled the list after polling 4,000 Brits, and ranked the winners based on how much their work "turned conventional thinking on its head, the popular acclaim they received, their intellectual power, their achievements, and their cultural importance."

For further details, visit guardian.co.uk.

Remembering Moondog, Influence on Steve Reich and Philip Glass

In Sunday's New York Times, writer John Strausbaugh remembers Moondog, the avant-garde street poet/performer/composer who influenced the likes of Steve Reich and Philip Glass. This "Viking of Sixth Avenue," as he was known, was a longtime fixture on the corner of Manhattan's Sixth Avenue and 54th Street through the early '70s. And though he passed away in 1999 at the age of 83, Moondog, a new book by Robert Scotto makes clear the artist's lasting influence. In the book's preface, Philip Glass writes that he and Reich took Moondog's work "very seriously and understood and appreciated it much more than what we were exposed to at Julliard.”

A festival featuring Moondog's work (alongside that of Beethoven and Bach, among others) will take place this weekend at the Advent Lutheran Church on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

ABT Unveils Dance Based on Philip Glass's "Portrait of Chuck Close"

On Saturday, October 27, at New York City Center, American Ballet Theatre will give the world premiere of C. to C. (Close to Chuck), created by Finnish choreographer Jorma Elo. The new piece was inspired by Philip Glass's A Musical Portrait of Chuck Close, which the composer wrote for pianist Bruce Levingston in 2005. As the New York Sun reports, Glass, so often a subject of portraits by Close, met the painter in the 1960s when they were both a part of a fledgling artistic movement "hell-bent," in Close's words, "to purge our work of every other artist—to try to find something personal and idiosyncratic, not tradition-bound." Close goes on to lavish high praise on Glass, calling him "the most inventive and innovative composer of my adult life." For the painter, the addition of Elo's choreography reminds him of those earlier collaborative days: "To get a good choreographer and composer and visual artist together," he tells the Sun, "it's like old home week!"

For information on tickets to C. to C. (Close to Chuck), running through November 4, visit abt.org.

To read the complete New York Sun article on the creation of the piece, go to nysun.com.

The Guardian on Philip Glass: "His Achievement Is Massive"

In the October 19 issue of The Guardian, the London newspaper ran the following editorial honoring Philip Glass on the occasion of his 70th birthday celebration, Glassworks, at London's Barbican Centre. The events included a rare performance—the first in London since 1985—of Glass's entire Music in 12 Parts by the Philip Glass Ensemble:

Few composers of our time have dismantled the barriers between the music of the people and the music of the elite more consistently and creatively than Philip Glass. So it is appropriate that this weekend's celebration of Mr Glass's 70th birthday at London's Barbican Centre should feature not just Patti Smith and Leonard Cohen—two of the many performers from other traditions with whom he has worked through the years—but the remarkable (and, at three-and-a-half hours, remarkably long) Music in 12 Parts, which the composer created for his own ensemble in the early 1970s. There continues to be a lively debate about whether Mr Glass's determination to rid his music of the trappings of the conservatoire and the past has been a new path or a blind alley for modern art music. But the fact that the debate still rages is proof that the question matters. If the critics have often turned up their noses at Mr Glass's abandonment of development and harmony (as well as disharmony) the public—instinctively sensing that he, like them, was for ever changed by Chuck Berry—has generally embraced his focus on rhythm, repetition, volume and duration. The London stage premiere of Mr Glass's 1980 opera about Gandhi, Satyagraha, was one of the great musical events of 2007. Let us hope Mr Glass's latest opera, Appomattox, about the end of the American civil war, which premiered in San Francisco this month, reaches our stages more quickly. Mr Glass's music may be minimalist, but his achievement is massive.

The editorial can also be read on The Guardian's website, guardian.co.uk.

Marathon Motivators: Steve Reich and Philip Glass

In today's Kansas City Star, music writer Paul Horsley recommends that runners prepping for a long-distance run, like this weekend's Kansas City Marathon, avoid the common mistake of training to disposable Top 40 hits ("simple carbs"). He recommends instead a healthy dose of "high energy" compositions to motivate through the long haul. On his list of Top 10 training tunes: Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians and Philip Glass's score to Koyaanisqatsi.