Page 54 - Kronos Quartet News Today

I had to take numerous breaks while reading Silenced by Sound. Ian Brennan’s self-righteous clairvoyance would just not stop beating me over the head. Silenced by Sound: The Music Meritocracy Myth Ian Brennan September 2019 Sometime in 2016, I noticed that American recording artist Lady Gaga was receiving a publicity push for her forthcoming album Joannein a manner that could arguably be described as unprecedented. The photo of her wearing that pink hat in profile seemed to be everywhere on...

I will have died, and you will continue bordering our life.

Astor Piazzolla [photo: Quinteto Astor Piazzolla] ‘Traitor.’ ‘Apostate.’ ‘Little Lucifer.’ Astor Piazzolla was called all of these things and worse by his fellow Argentinians during his long career. It seems absurd now to think he received death threats in the 60s for breaking with tradition and taking tango off the dance floor and into the conservatory. Yet it was not only arch-conservatives who damned his innovations. Aníbal Tro...

Courtesy of the artist Last October, in the midst of the pandemic, Laurie Anderson appeared at the Smithsonians Hirshhorn Museum to recreate one of her earliest works. Wearing ice skates attached to frozen blocks of ice, she played her violin along with a tape recording stashed cleverly inside her instrument. When the ice melted, her performance ended. Bow over bridge, blades over ice: "Duets on Ice" is a meditation on balance and time. Anderson has been playing the violin since age five. S...

What’s happening in the arts world Updated April 8, 2021, 8:00 p.m. Email to a Friend MUSIC Pop & Rock DREAMER’S CIRCUS Celebrity Series presents a prerecorded concert from Copenhagen by this vibrant Danish trio. Consisting of fiddler Rune Tonsgaard Sorensen (also of the Danish String Quartet), pianist/accordionist Nikolaj Busk, and Nordic cittern player Ale Carr, the band is steeped in Nordic folk music traditions but never hesitant to give them its own distinctive spin. Live Q&A wit...

The Center for the Performing Arts at Penn State will welcome the virtual return of the groundbreaking Kronos Quartet in a presentation of the string ensemble’s performance film “Testimony.” The free concert recording features music and spoken-word artists reflecting on current events in the United States. “Testimony” will be available to watch from 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 14, until 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 21 at cpa.psu.edu/events/kronos-2021. The program is part of the Center f...

Embers: Haunting, unsettling evocations of the past Genre: Classical Louth Contemporary Music Society’s latest well-played album is a kind of musical sandwich, with works by Irish composer Raymond Deane enclosing a much longer work by Ukrainian Valentin Silvestrov.  Deane is now in his late 60s, Silvestrov in his mid 80s, and the works range in date from 1973 (Deane’s Embers) to 2011 (Silvestrov’s Third Quartet, dedicated to and premièred by the Kronos Quartet). But they have rather mor...

Written by Emily Morrow on April 1, 2021 If legendary jazz musicians were collected together in one giant jigsaw puzzle and each musician was one piece – Thelonious Monk’s individual piece would be impossible to cut out. As a singular artist, his shape or place in jazz is too uniquely non-conforming. From a musical and historical standpoint, he is recognized as one of the first creators of modern jazz and a major influence on the later development of the Beb...

Revisiting Bay Area theater’s first pandemic interviews one year later Early pandemic interviewing felt like asking someone to peer off a cliff into an abyss and tell me what they saw. Lily Janiak March 16, 2021Updated: March 16, 2021, 8:11 pm The Frost Amphitheater begins to fill up for a Kali Uchis and Jorja Smith concert at Stanford. Photo: Santiago Mejia, The Chronicle 2019 When I interviewed theater artists and producers in late February and early March of last year, I often felt...

Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. Vladimir Jurowski conducts Barrie Kosky’s new staging with Marlis Petersen (Die Marschallin), Samantha Hankey (Octavian), Katharina Konradi (Sophie), Christof Fischesser (Baron Ochs auf Lerchenau), and Johannes Martin Kränzle (Herr von Faninal). The new production will be performed in the arrangement by Eberhard Kloke which transcribes the score to match the orchestration of Strauss’s opera Ariadne auf Naxos. View here. 12 pm ET: IDAGIO Global Conce...