Leonard Slatkin Featured on Gramophone

Ahead of Leonard Slatkin’s 80th birthday on September 1, Gramophone magazine celebrates the illustrious American conductor with a full-length feature that covers his musical family, his time with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, his slew of recordings of unusual repertoire, and his American Sound Initiative.

By Thomas May

His vivid curiosity is unmistakable in the variety of projects planned for this milestone birthday year. These range from publishing a pair of books and spending more time on his own composition to launching a new partnership as artistic consultant to the Las Vegas Philharmonic. Appearances on the podium are naturally also on the calendar. This autumn brings reunions with the three American orchestras indelibly shaped by Slatkin’s years at their helm (in St Louis, Washington DC and Detroit); some international conducting engagements beckon as well.

To read the full piece, click here.

Leonard-Slatkin (© Cindy McTee)

“The Righteous” featured in the Wall Street Journal’s Arts Calendar

The Wall Street Journal selected this weekend’s premiere of The Righteous, a new piece presented by Santa Fe Opera, as one of its highly selective arts calendar picks for the week.

The Righteous was created by two of America's most exciting talents, composer Gregory Spears (Fellow Travelers, O Columbia, Paul's Case and A New Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei) and librettist Tracy K. Smith (To Free the Captives, Life on Mars, Ordinary Life: A Memoir and Such Color: New and Selected Poems), who is a former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner.

The opera explores the intersection between genuine faith and political power in the American Southwest of the 1980s. Along the way, the characters’ sacred love for God becomes entwined with the complicated realities of their romantic lives. This is the second operatic collaboration between Spears and Smith, whose Castor and Patience, from 2022, was nominated for Best World Premiere at the International Opera Awards.

Six performances are scheduled: July 13, 17, 26, 30; and August 7 and 13, 2024.

Leonard Slatkin Receives Abu Dhabi Festival Lifetime Achievement Award

On June 14, Leonard Slatkin — one of the great American conductors, celebrating his 80th birthday this year — received the Abu Dhabi Festival Lifetime Achievement Award at Disney Hall, in Los Angeles. The celebration was part of a concert sponsored by the Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Festival. There was music by 21 composers, including 10 world premieres. The special program honored the visual artist Bob Peak (1927–1992), whose artwork includes posters for the classic films West Side Story, Superman: The Movie, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Apocalypse Now, Silverado, My Fair Lady, and Camelot.

Film music author and Historian Jon Burlingame explained, “It's rare when an evening at the symphony combines music and art so brilliantly. Friday night's ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ concert was both a tribute to legendary movie-poster artist Bob Peak and a collection of superb compositions inspired by Peak's paintings.” The Los Angeles Film Orchestra, under the direction of Maestro Slatkin, performed film-music classics accompanied by Bob Peak’s original artwork.

Leonard Slatkin conducts the Los Angeles Film Orchestra_ Bob Peak concert (credit: Kyle Espeleta)

Slatkin commented that his parents played in orchestras at 20th Century-Fox and Warner Bros. throughout the 1950s and '60s. Impresario and host Robert Townson spoke of his relationship working with Bob Peak, commissioning a portrait of composer Jerry Goldsmith for a Masters Film Music release in 1988, even pre-dating his 30-year career with Varèse Sarabande Records. Townson explained this concert was based on an idea and dream he had for over 25 years.

For the second half of the concert, Townson realized his vision of a 10-movement concept inspired by Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.” Townson created a modern-day interpretation by commissioning 10 contemporary composers—most of whom are primarily known for their film work—to pen new pieces inspired by Peak's non-film work. These ranged from Mychael Danna's moving musical portrait of Mother Teresa, Jeff Beal's reminiscence of the 1964 New York World's Fair, Harry Gregson-Williams' charming "Two Girls with Sparklers” to Don Davis' powerful anthem inspired by Peak's 1978 portrait of golden eagles in flight, and an original song tribute for an Audrey Hepburn painting, written and sung by Tony-winner Marc Shaiman.

Leonard Slatkin, Thomas Peak, Robert Townson (credit: Kyle Espeleta)

The event was co-produced by Robert Townson Productions and the Abu Dhabi Festival. LA Mayor Karen Bass presented a certificate of recognition to the Founder of the Abu Dhabi Festival, Her Excellency Huda Alkhamis-Kanoo, for her unwavering dedication and commitment to global philanthropic efforts and her role as a patron of the arts. Her Excellency presented two Abu Dhabi Festival Awards recognizing outstanding lifetime contributions to arts and culture. The first was presented to conductor Leonard Slatkin, and the second was posthumously awarded to artist Bob Peak. His son, Thomas Peak, accepted on the family’s behalf. Thomas Peak presented one of his father’s paint brushes to Robert Townson.

Robert Townson_ Bob Peak concert_5_Matthew Joseph Peak (credit: Kyle Espeleta)

Congratulations, Maestro Slatkin!

Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Davis and Bodhi Tree announce 2026 world premiere of bilingual ‘Pancho Rabbit’ opera

After a seven-year gestation, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis and San Diego’s Bodhi Tree Concerts have announced that Davis’ bilingual chamber-opera adaptation of the children’s book “Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote: A Migrant’s Tale” will receive its world premiere in January 2026 in both San Diego and Tijuana.

Combining elements of allegory, fable and social commentary, the chamber-opera is based on author Duncan Tonatiuh’s award-winning 2013 children’s book of the same name, which addresses current immigration issues and is set at the U.S.-Mexico border.

It will be sung in English, Spanish and a “border slang” combination of the two languages. The characters include the titular rabbit, a coyote, a snake, and monarch butterflies that freely migrate each year between the U.S. and Mexico.

Read the full article here.

Graeme Steele Johnson’s “forgotten sounds” project featured on the Washington Post

While doing research on Charles Martin Loeffler's “Two Rhapsodies for Oboe, Viola and Piano,” for a program note, the clarinetist, arranger, and writer Graeme Steele Johnson found references to an unknown octet by the same composer. Though we don't hear much about Loeffler these days, he was hailed as “the Dean of American composers” at the time of his death in 1935.

Graeme found no recordings or score, realizing that the piece had been unheard, unperformed, and unpublished for more than 125 years (it had only received two performances, in 1897). He ultimately tracked the manuscript down to the archives of the Library of Congress and spent a year editing it, which was full of erasures and corrections. It was “an adventure in musical archaeology.”

“It kind of goes with this lost-and-found theme,” Graeme says in this wonderful feature, for which Graeme talked to Michael Brodeur, the classical music critic from the Washington Post., ahead of a performance of the piece on May 22 at the Library of Congress. “With hope that Loeffler’s octet and all of the other wonderful, deserving music that has somehow slipped through the cracks will follow Schubert into the musical pantheon.”

The album, Forgotten Sounds, featuring the premiere recording of Graeme's edition of the octet, is available on June 7, 2024.

Read the full piece on The Washington Post.

Marc-André Hamelin Featured on "5 Classical Music Albums You Can Listen to Right Now," by The New York Times

On Feb. 2, 2024, our esteemed client Marc-André Hamelin, a superstar pianist of world renown, released New Piano Works on Hyperion, his first album in 14 years that features his own music exclusively. It has amassed superlative reviews since; the latest is by the New York Times. Critic Seth Colter Walls selected New Piano Works for the Times’ “5 Classical Music Albums You Can Listen to Right Now,” published on April 25, 2024.

The Canadian virtuoso Marc-André Hamelin is persuasive in a wide span of repertoire that includes C.P.E. Bach, Frederic Rzewski and William Bolcom. He also composes. His 1998 album “The Composer-Pianists” was a sweeping survey that also included selections from his 12 Etudes in all the Minor Keys, which he released in their entirety in 2010.

His previous offerings of his own music were rich, but his latest self-portrait album is on another level. As before, he is a devoted tipper-of-the-cap: This set’s opening “Variations on a Theme of Paganini,” from 2011, nods to one of Rachmaninoff’s riffs on that much-adapted Caprice No. 24. It’s all good fun, but there is another quality on this set that moves well beyond a game of spot the quotation. Call it a more sumptuous synthesis.

Even as Hamelin’s “Suite à l’Ancienne” (2019) and “Pavane Variée” (2014) blend vintage forms and tunes with advanced harmonic trappings, his well-documented affection for jazz also peeks through. That’s not so surprising, since he has played jazz-influenced sonatas and études by Nikolai Kapustin, too. But Hamelin’s particular feel for incorporating blues sonorities strikes me as less of a pastiche than Kapustin’s — even when he is mixing American textures with 16th-century chanson. It’s probably time to add the epaulet of “rising composer” to this pianist’s already imposing biography.

SETH COLTER WALLS

A Starry Night of Contemporary Composition Under the LA Phil’s Green Umbrella

SAN FRANCISCO CLASSICAL VOICE
By Richard S. Ginell

Here in a nutshell is what went on under the Green Umbrella at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Tuesday night, April 16.

There were no less than five world premieres, four of which kicked off a promising project, LA Phil Etudes, along with a fifth by Canadian-born composer Zosha Di Castri. Anthony Davis, famed for his operas X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X and The Central Park Five, was present to take in his terrific jazz-drenched clarinet concerto, You Have the Right to Remain Silent. LA Phil Creative Chair John Adams conducted.

It all went more than well. This was a consistently stimulating evening of new music, sometimes in surprising ways.

Read more here.

A Pulitzer-Winning Composer Puts His Operatic Spin on Edith Wharton

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Seth Colter Walls

The composer and pianist Anthony Davis is known for drawing inspiration from real-world figures in his operas.

“X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” — recently mounted by the Metropolitan Opera — and “The Central Park Five,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020, are both grave, ripped-from-the-headlines stories about well-known people.

But Davis has also written rollicking adaptations of literary material. Less frequently produced but no less interesting are chamber operas like “Lilith” — a saucy and inventive take on the story of Adam’s first wife that features a divorce court in the Garden of Eden. Similarly, “Lear on the 2nd Floor” is a riff on Shakespeare that brings “King Lear” into contemporary discussions about medicine and Alzheimer’s disease.

Read more here.

Sandbox Percussion Wins a 2024 Avery Fisher Career Grant

Brooklyn-based quartet becomes the first-ever percussion ensemble to receive award

The GRAMMY®-nominated ensemble Sandbox Percussion, a quartet of established leaders in contemporary art music and percussion, received a 2024 Avery Fisher Career Grant on March 20. The awards ceremony took place in the Jerome L. Greene Performance Space at WQXR studios, where Sandbox Percussion and four other artists were announced as this year’s recipients of the career-advancing grant, which the Avery Fisher Artist Program awards every year to no more than five artists. The $25,000 grant provides professional assistance and recognizes instrumental artists who the program believes have great potential for major careers in classical music.

“We are deeply honored by this award from the distinguished Avery Fisher Artist Program,” said percussionist Ian Rosenbaum, who co-founded Sandbox Percussion in 2011 with fellow members Jonathan Allen, Victor Caccese, and Terry Sweeney through a mutual love of chamber music and contemporary composition. They are now an internationally renowned new-music quartet and have become the first percussion ensemble to receive the prestigious award. “We have looked up to many of the previous recipients and been inspired by them for years,” added Rosenbaum. “It’s exciting to become part of the celebrated history of this program.”

Deborah Borda, the Avery Fisher Artist Program Chair, and Nancy Fisher, daughter of the late Avery and Janet Fisher, presented the awards at the ceremony, which coincided with the program’s 50th anniversary. The annual ceremony includes a short performance by each selected artist and a professional recording. This year’s performances, which included music by the Balourdet Quartet, violinists Njioma Chinyere Grevious and Julian Rhee, and pianist Clayton Stephenson, besides Sandbox Percussion, will be broadcast on April 11 at 8 p.m. and April 13 at 7 p.m. on WQXR 105.9 FM.

2024 Avery Fisher Career Grant recipients (L-R) Balourdet Quartet, Njioma Chinyere Grevious, Clayton Stephenson, Julian Rhee, and Sandbox Percussion.
(Photo credit: Jennifer Taylor)

Sandbox Percussion performed “Pillar V” from the riotous Seven Pillars, a 2021 feature-length suite for percussion quartet composed by Andy Akiho and commissioned by Sandbox Percussion, which the New York Times called “a lush, brooding celebration of noise.” “Pillar V” is built around a hexatonic scale and an interminable ostinato; with each repetition, the music swells and presses forward relentlessly, ending with an obsessive acceleration of the six pitches of the scale. Seven Pillars earned Sandbox Percussion and Akiho a GRAMMY® nomination for “Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance,” and the composer a “finalist” placement for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Music. Since the world premiere in 2021, Sandbox Percussion has taken Seven Pillars on tour throughout the United States and Europe, with stage direction and lighting design by Michael Joseph McQuilken.

The Avery Fisher Career Grant will allow the recording and touring ensemble to jumpstart a follow-up commission from Akiho, a steelpan virtuoso with whom the quartet has a mutual synergy that resulted in the creation of Seven Pillars. The success of that work and its ongoing performance history has inspired Sandbox Percussion and Akiho to collaborate on a new piece, this time with Akiho joining the group on the steelpan. The planned quintet, about an hour long, will bring to fruition the potential that was discovered and cultivated throughout the collaborative process for Seven Pillars. It will add Akiho’s virtuosic talents as a performer. A recording and a tour as a live quintet are also in the works.

This season, Sandbox Percussion performed at the Park Avenue Armory’s Veterans Room, featuring premieres by Chris Cerrone and Viet Cuong, and at the 92nd Street Y with new-music specialist Conor Hanick on piano. In May, the quartet performs at Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center with acclaimed new-music performers Dawn Upshaw, Gilbert Kalish, and Alisa Weilerstein. Sandbox Percussion will also continue to champion Viet Cuong’s ingenious concerto for percussion quartet Re(new)al, which they have performed every season since the premiere in 2017.

In the summer, the ensemble will give the world premieres of Prophecies of Fire, by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Luther Adams; and To Sing or Dance, for violin and percussion quartet, by GRAMMY® winner Joan Tower, also featuring violinist Soovin Kim. Later this year and in upcoming seasons, Sandbox Percussion will also perform new music by Douglas J. Cuomo, Tyshawn Sorey, Paola Prestini, and Gabriel Kahane. Future album releases include music by Michael Torke and by Chris Cerrone.

To learn more about Sandbox Percussion, please visit sandboxpercussion.com.

8va among OBSERVER’S 2024 “Top PR Firms for the Performing Arts”

It’s an honor to be one of Observer's “Top PR Firms for the Performing Arts” for 2024. One of only five! We feel so privileged to work with the greatest clients in the world. Thank you for your trust; it’s an honor to work with you.

With a roster of clients that includes the Emmy Award-winning All-Star Orchestra, internationally recognized conductor Gerard Schwarz, Beijing Music Festival, composer-of-the-moment Andy Akiho and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis, 8VA Music Consultancy is involved in the careers of the contemporary classical giants. One of the few PR firms specializing in classical music, it takes its name from the abbreviation for all' ottava, Italian for “at the octave,” which instructs musicians to play an octave higher than written.

Read the full Observer piece HERE.