Got an idea for a classical cartoon or a reaction to this one? Leave your thoughts in the comments section.
Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist working with sculpture, drawing, photography and performance. His new book isHelguera's Artunes. You can see more of his work atArtworld Salon and on his own site.
Got an idea for a classical cartoon? Leave it in the comments section.
Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist working with sculpture, drawing, photography and performance. You can see more of his work at Artworld Salon and on his own site.
It's fun to stay at the ИМКА: Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring triggered an uproar at its world premiere in Paris a century ago. Now we're asking you to help celebrate the centennial by creating a dance of your own.
Soprano Jennifer Zetlan sang two early Muhly songs, plus an excerpt from his opera Two Boys, a Metropolitan Opera commission that will receive its U.S. premier this October at the Met.
Credit Ebru Yildiz / For NPR
Muhly opened the show with A Hudson Cycle (for solo piano) which he composed as a wedding gift for friends and describes as, "music of longing and anticipation."
Credit Ebru Yildiz / For NPR
Violist Nadia Sirota is a long-time Muhly collaborator. She performed Muhly's Etude 3, a piece Muhly wrote for her which also appears on her latest album, Baroque.
Credit Ebru Yildiz / For NPR
The wonderful indie folk singer Sam Amidon was something of a surprise guest on the program. His three song set included what he called "a murder ballad," which was punctuated by a long and terrific scream.
Credit Ebru Yildiz / For NPR
Nico Muhly, one of the most talked-about and widely heard composers today, gathered a group of friends to perform at the (Le) Poisson Rouge in Manhattan. Muhly labeled the show: "Things I love, things my friends love, and things I've written."
Credit Ebru Yildiz / For NPR
Violinist Jennifer Chun (and her sister Jennifer) joined for a performance of Muhly's Honest Music, a piece from 2002 originally for violin and prerecorded music.
Credit Ebru Yildiz / For NPR
For his piece Skip Town, Muhly processed the piano, giving it a kind of ramshackle feel — half way between a harpsichord and a honky-tonk piano.
Credit Ebru Yildiz / For NPR
Angela Chun performs Muhly's Honest Music, the fragmentary nature which has been described as "the sad beauty of things coming together and things falling apart."
Opera audiences are well acquainted with all manners of intrigue — whether political, romantic or psychological. The exciting American composer Nico Muhly is updating that paradigm to the 21st century with his opera Two Boys.
We love mothers for all the Hallmark reasons: for their compassion and patience, not to mention giving birth. But some moms aren't exactly greeting card friendly — and none less so than those who live in the opera house.
This is opera, after all, so we expect the outrageous. But operatic moms seem to be disproportionately portrayed as murderers, harpies or generally women on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Your Normas, Medeas, Butterflies, Queens of the Night and Clytemnestras.
Conductor Christoph Eschenbach and the National Symphony Orchestra gave the final performance in this year's Spring for Music Festival at Carnegie Hall on May 11, 2013. The program was of all 20th-century Russian music: Shchedrin's Slava, Slava; Schnittke's Viola Concerto; and Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony.
Credit Torsten Kjellstrand for NPR
Schnittke wrote his viola concerto for Carpenter's teacher, Russian violist Yuri Bashmet — and Bashmet's name forms the melodic kernel for the entire 40-minute work.
Credit Torsten Kjellstrand for NPR
Conductor Christoph Eschenbach's baton case for the evening.
Credit Torsten Kjellstrand for NPR
In acknowledging listeners' applause, Eschenbach and the NSO musicians returned the audience's warmth.
Credit Torsten Kjellstrand for NPR
Conductor Christoph Eschenbach and the National Symphony Orchestra gave the final performance in this year's Spring for Music Festival at Carnegie Hall on May 11, 2013. The program was of all 20th-century Russian music: Shchedrin's Slava, Slava; Schnittke's Viola Concerto; and Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony.
Credit Torsten Kjellstrand for NPR
The superb, rising American violist David Aaron Carpenter made his Carnegie Hall debut this evening in Alfred Schnittke's Viola Concerto.
Credit Torsten Kjellstrand for NPR
Eschenbach took the final minutes of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony far more slowly than most conductors — about twice as slow, by his own reckoning.
Credit Torsten Kjellstrand for NPR
Backstage, a helpful sign to guide the out-of-town musicians find their way through the warrens of Carnegie Hall.
Credit Torsten Kjellstrand for NPR
In an interview with WQXR, Christoph Eschenbach called Rostropovich "a great idol of mine since my youth," and explained how each of the three pieces on this Spring for Music program was meant to reflect a facet of Rostropovich's lifework.
Credit Torsten Kjellstrand for NPR
Carpenter bore down deep into this technically and emotionally demanding work.
Credit Torsten Kjellstrand for NPR
The performance, which was presented as a tribute to the NSO's late leader, conductor and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, opened with Rodion Shchedrin's Slava, Slava: an brilliant and clangorous 5-minute piece that features tubular bells.
Ólafur Arnalds, Recorded Live At (Le) Poisson Rouge
How can music be happy and sad at the same time? Listen to Olafur Arnalds and you'll hear it. Depending on your mood, the tone changes, and a song that may have been uplifting one day sounds like an elegy the next. It's spacious, undeniably beautiful work. Much of the music performed in this concert, recorded on April 18 at (Le) Poisson Rouge in New York City, is drawn from the Icelandic musician's recent album For Now I Am Winter.
You might never tell by her youth or her warm and approachable demeanor, but 26-year-old Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti has already had an extraordinary career. Mentored by Yehudi Menuhin starting at age 10, Benedetti won the BBC Young Musician of the Year Award a decade ago — and, really, that was just a warm-up.
