October 14, 2007

It’s this week in classical music, an update on what’s happening in the classical music world, I’m Randy Kinkel.

Philip Glass’s new Opera “Appomattox” is getting mixed reviews jn the press.  Critic David Marmelstein called it “a significant work, to my mind one of the best new operas in many years, evoking the U.S. Civil War and its aftermath in complexly pleasing music and imagery.”  Others weren’t so pleased; Joshua Cosman of the San Francisco Chronicle called it “ambitious and maddeningly inconsistent”, and wondered if Glass’s music had enough dramatic power for the subject at hand.  Another critic was even less enthusiastic, saying the opera “Browbeats its audience with ham-fisted messages, hampered by a libretto that seems to have been stitched together on deadline”. You still have time to go see it for yourself if you want to travel to the city by the Bay.  Appomattox runs at San Francisco Opera through October 24th.

Baritone Thomas Hampson joins the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music this fall in the newly created position of Visiting Distinguished Artist for Vocal Studies and Distance Learning. One of his first activities with the school puts the "distance learning" part of his title into action — Hampson will conduct a master class simultaneously at the Manhattan School and Philadelphia's Curtis Institute via Internet2.

Alex Ross sees classical music as the new Underground.  In An Interview with the New York Observer’s Doree Shafrir, The 39-year-old author of the book ““The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century”, which goes on sale Tuesday, says, “There’s kind of a great new sense of energy among younger composers… In some ways it’s total chaos, because there are so many things going on at once. But there’s also a sense of optimism, sort of. I think they also see possibilities for classical music.  Classical music is the new underground. That may sound ridiculous, but there’s a grain of truth to it. People are talking about the power that comes with being apart from mainstream pop culture. You can make a living and get stuff performed.”

For more information on these and other items and events, go to the KBAQ website at KBAQ-dot-org.… be listening every week at this time for another update, and join me at noon every weekday for the Mozart Buffet, an hour of music by Mozart and his contemporaries, … I’m Randy Kinkel, for KBAQ’s  “This week in Classical Music”…  on 89-five KBAQ, K-B-A-Q Phoenix, a service of Rio Salado College and Arizona State University.