Glenn Kotche and Kronos Quartet premiere Kotche piece at Carnegie Hall; Kronos continues with a Family Concert ... Dawn Upshaw is at Carnegie to perform Golijov's Ainadamar with Orchestra of St. Luke's ... Adams's A Flowering Tree gets its Japanese premiere ... David Byrne continues his musical "outpouring of joy" (Hartford Courant) in Connecticut and Tennessee ... Brad Mehldau plays two nights in Paris ... Mandy Patinkin keynotes SightLife's fall fundraiser and preps for two-week residency at New York's Public Theater ... Reich's Electric Counterpoint gets a xylosynth perfromance in England ... Wilco is on the road with Neil Young ... and more ...
Glenn Kotche's 2007 piece Anomaly, for string quartet and percussion, which he wrote for Kronos Quartet, will receive its New York premiere tonight at Carnegie Hall, in a performance by Glenn and Kronos in Zankel Hall. The concert will be preceded by a pre-concert talk, starting at 6:30 PM, in Zankel, with Glenn and Carnegie Hall's Director of Artistic Planning, Jeremy Geffen.
In addition to the Anomaly premiere, the concert includes what the New York Times's Vivien Schweitzer calls "a typically eclectic program" from Kronos, "[t]hat ever-adventurous ensemble." Featured are three world premiere and two other New York premieres, as well as a performance of the George Crumb's Black Angels, the Nonesuch recording of which London’s Evening Standard includes among its “100 Definitive Classical CDs of the 20th Century.”
Kronos returns to Carnegie the next day for a decidedly different concert, performing a Carnegie Hall Family Concert in Stern Auditorium, hosted by Dr. Craig Woodson. It's a three-part, interactive concert, in which Woodson will lead audience members in making instruments and Kronos will play a selection of music from around the world and invite the audience to play along on their new instruments.
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Also at Carnegie Hall this weekend is Dawn Upshaw, who joins the Orchestra of St. Luke's and conductor Robert Spano in a concert performance of Osvaldo Golijov's opera Ainadamar Sunday afternoon. Dawn performed in the opera's premiere in 2003, as was mezzo-soprano, Kelley O'Connor, who returns in the role of Federico García Lorca. Schweitzer, in recommending the event, describes piece as a mix of "South American popular music with klezmer, African chant and Latin percussion."
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John Adams's latest opera, A Flowering Tree, receives its Japanese premiere tomorrow night in a semi-stage performance at Tokyo's Suntory Hall by the Tokyo Symphony Chorus and Orchestra. The production features soprano Jessica Rivera and tenor Russell Thomas, reprising their roles from the Nonesuch recording, to which Audiophile Audition recently gave a perfect five stars and described as "a radiant sunburst of orchestral beauty. This score abounds in ravishing music, some of the most purely gorgeous music of recent years." Peter Sellars directs.
Adams's "Doctor Atomic" Symphony, based on musical elements from his previous opera, receives its Rhode Island premiere tonight at Brown University's Sayles Hall by the Brown University Ensemble, under the direction of Paul Phillips. The Ensemble will give an encore performance of the piece on Sunday.
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David Byrne continues his tour, Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno, tonight at the Foxwood's Fox Theatre in Ledyard, Connecticut, and Sunday at the Tennessee Theatre in Knoxville. After a performance of the show earlier this week, the Hartford Courant's Eric R. Danton declared: "It's entirely possible that no one on Earth Tuesday had as much fun at work as David Byrne did when he and his band performed at the Calvin Theatre in Northampton, Mass." He described the vibe from the performers on stage as "an outpouring of joy in the music they made and in the spectacle that surrounded it."
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Brad Mehldau plays two nights of solo piano this weekend in Paris at the Cité de la Musique, Saturday and Sunday nights.
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Mandy Patinkin serves as keynote speaker at Saturday's SightLife fall fundraising dinner at the Bell Harbor Conference Center in Seattle, Washington. SightLife is one of the nation's leading eye banks working to cure worldwide corneal blindness; Mandy himself is a double cornea transplant recipient.
On Monday, Mandy begins a two-week run at Manhattan's Public Theater in honor of the 20th anniversary of his first concert at the esteemed venue. Mandy will be joined by pianist Paul Ford, alternating among three different programs: Celebrating Sondheim, a journey through the music and lyrics of the legendary composer, who was also the subject of Mandy's 2002 Nonesuch release, Mandy Patinkin Sings Sondheim; Dress Casual, featuring music by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, Harry Chapin, and others, as he did in his 1995 Nonesuch album, Oscar & Steve; and Mamaloshen, sharing a title with his 1998 Nonesuch collection of traditional, classic, and contemporary songs sung entirely in Yiddish. For tickets, visit publictheater.org.
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Steve Reich's Cello Counterpoint will be performed by the University of Maryland Ensemble tomorrow night at Gildenhorn Recital Hall in College Park, Maryland; the same night, across the pond, the xylosynth version of Reich's Electric Counterpoint will be performed by percussionist Joby Burgess at the Pavilion Theatre at Brighton Dome in England.
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Wilco continues its run of concerts opening for the legendary Neil Young this weekend. Tonight, they'll open for Young without Glenn at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto; Sunday, the full band is in Detroit to open at the Palace of Auburn Hill. Glenn returns on Saturday when the band headlines without Young in a sold-out show at the Auditorium Theater in Rochester, New York.
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