Feast of Music

FREE TICKETS: New Amsterdam Dual Album Release: The Knells and itsnotyouitsme

NOTE: This Contest Has Ended.

Tuesday, December 10, at 7:30 p.m., New Amsterdam Records presents an epic dual album release show at SubCulture.

The evening features progressive neo-psychedelic chamber band The Knells' self-titled debut, as well as ambient post-rock duo itsnotyouitsme's This I, a collaboration with jazz vocalist Theo Bleckmann and bassist Skúli Sverrisson. 

 

 For your chance to win:

1. Email free@feastofmusic.com    -OR-

2. Tweet #FreeTickets New Amsterdam to @feastofmusic    -OR-

3. Head to our Facebook page and COMMENT on our giveaway post! Note: "Likes" on their own will not be considered valid entries. 

FREE TICKETS: Aleck Karis at Merkin Hall

NOTE: This contest has ended.

Sunday, December 8, at 7:30 p.m., contemporary pianist Aleck Karis presents an evening dedicated to the life of Morton Feldman, and FoM is giving away two pairs of free tickets to the performance!

In addition to Feldman's works, the program includes pieces by Feldman's teacher, Stefan Wolpe, as well as Wolpe's teacher, Anton Webern. Karis hopes to reveal an intimate bond and commonality of sound between the three piano masters that reaches deeper than the obvious student-teacher succession. 

For your chance to win:

1. Email free@feastofmusic.com    -OR-

2. Tweet #FreeTickets Aleck Karis to @feastofmusic    -OR-

3. Head to our Facebook page and COMMENT on our giveaway post! Note: "Likes" on their own will not be considered valid entries. 

Calder Quartet and Iva Bittová Complete Bartók Cycle at Metropolitan Museum of Art

by Robert Leeper

In the years before the World War I, Béla Bartók traveled the countryside in his native Hungary and the surrounding areas collecting, cataloging, and even primitively recording folk music of the native peoples, traveling to Transylvania, Bulgaria, and even North Africa in pursuit of his ethnomusicological obsession. Not to be deterred by the war—when he was excused from military service for health reasons—the government sent him and his fellow collector, Zoltán Kodály, into military camps to collect folk songs from soldiers.

The Calder Quartet, an adventurous quartet conceived at the Thornton School at the University of Southern California, has been focusing on Bartok's string quartets this season at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Despite Bartók's small output of vocal works, the group has paid homage to the composer's journeys in search of his native folk music by featuring guests on each program who help the quartet to explore the vocal aspects of his music.

On Friday evening at the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, the ensemble finished their quartet cycle by taking the stage with the entrancing Czech violinist, singer, and composer Iva Bittová, presenting a program including Bartók's Second and Sixth quartets, as well as songs and works by Leoš Janáček and Bittová, and free improvisations.

White Light Festival: Week Four Recap

The final week of the 2013 White Light Festival brought three extraordinary events to Lincoln Center that served to remind concertgoers of the remarkable breadth and eye-popping wonder of this welcome—and hopefully permanent—addition to the New York concert calendar. As Festival Director Jane Moss explained to me during one of the festival's White Light Lounges, these events are not intended to be overtly spiritual so much as "open up rooms inside of you."  

Last Saturday at Alice Tully Hall, Britain's Tallis Scholars—who appeared during the first White Light Festival in 2010 and are celebrating their 40th anniversary this year—returned with a program centered around British masters from the Tudor era, music which they sing better than anyone. The bulk of the concert consisted of selections from John Taverner's Missa Gloria tibi Trinitas, written sometime in the early 16th century. The Scholars, 12 SATB singers positioned in a semicircle, sang as a seamless whole, with a tone so pure it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. By the end of the "Agnus Dei," the Scholars were running on all cylinders, soaring in sonic majesty both overwhelming and sublime.

Alan Gilbert Leads New York Philharmonic in Britten Celebration

by Robert Leeper

Photo credit: Karstan Moran, The New York Times

On Thursday the New York Philharmonic, led by the intrepid Alan Gilbert, paid homage to the centenary of Benjamin Britten with the first of three concerts devoted to his music. Before the performance, Mr. Gilbert regaled the audience with the dramatic tale of the Philharmonic's attempt to find two new tenors after Paul Appleby, who recently appeared in Two Boys at the Met, took ill the day before. Fortunately, the Phil had a game plan, and it paid off.   

Beginning with the Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings, replacement Michael Slattery gave a strong, if slightly timid, reading. His voice is perhaps not quite as powerful as is befitting this part, yet the light texture of his voice brought merits of its own. Philip Myers, now in his 33rd season as the orchestra's principal horn player, gave a rather rough reading to the natural horn part that opens the work, but made up for it at the end of the piece when the offstage horn part rings out from the distance as John Keats' poem "To Sleep" is softly sung.

Britten's Spring Symphony represents "the progress of Winter to Spring and the reawakening of the Earth and life which that means." The piece, divided into four movements comparable to a standard symphony, begins with reflective slowness and progresses until the wordless chorus of the last movement, reflecting the lack of words available to describe the joys of May and beyond as revelers eat and drink their fill after a long winter.