Just before 3 o’clock Sunday, the Atlanta Chamber Players’ “Rapido!” national finals were about to start, the culmination of an eight-month, 29-state composition contest (read more here). The audience was filing into the High Museum of Art’s Hill Auditorium. One of the judges, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Music Director Robert Spano, asked the other judges -- composer Michael Gandolfi and Atlanta Opera General Director Dennis Hanthorn -- whether he should read through the scores before the concert or hear the music cold, like the rest of the audience.
Contestants had been given two weeks to compose a set of miniatures, four to ...
The Cobb Symphony had been in the business of playing the old-time classics for 60 years. But orchestras that perpetually take from the repertoire and never give anything back are no longer living in today's arts community. They have stagnated into something akin to "heritage tourism," closer in spirit to a Civil War re-enactment or a Renaissance fair than to a vibrant arts scene. Indeed, a lack of new repertoire -- one that energizes and connects with a broader audience -- is what had been steering the whole classical music industry off a cliff.
Cobb Symphony Music Director Michael Alexander and ...
A rare few inches of snow, a cap of ice and slick streets across metro Atlanta -- and a dearth of snowplows -- has shut down schools for three days and now canceled performances by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Alliance Theatre.
Thursday night's planned performance of "Bring It On: The Musical" at the Alliance has been canceled. (The show, once it begins, will run through February 20.) And the ASO's annual celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. has also been canceled. A one-night-only event, the concert is recorded annually by National Public Radio and broadcast nationally for the Monday national holiday. ...
Where do you draw the line with folk music? When cultures intersect and cross-pollinate, is it possible to find the one authentic seed, the single point of originality? Or, mixing metaphors, is it like cutting open an onion, where the peelings themselves are what you’re looking for, since there is no core?
On Thursday, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and conductor Robert Spano explored several facets of this question, in another tightly constructed program (Spano’s great specialty) where the ideas resonated within and among works and the sequence of music played delightful games in the listener’s ear.
Franz Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody” No. 2 ...
The Possible Futures foundation is getting into the book business. Its first such venture is "Atlanta Art Now," a portrait of the contemporary art scene expressed through ideas and critical trends shared by a sampling of the city’s artists. Expect publication in November 2011.
"The Atlanta arts community stands to benefit greatly from a visible and informed public conversation about the most meaningful lines of critical inquiry currently being pursued in this city," said Louis Corrigan, founder of Possible Futures. "My hope is that AAN would help situate the most engaging trends within the work of Atlanta-area artists within discussions of contemporary art ...
In part, it’s a numbers game. About 800 music students are enrolled at New York’s prestigious Juilliard School. The Sichuan Conservatory, in Chengdu, China, has 10,000. By some measures, between 40 and 100 million children in China are learning Western classical music, mostly piano or violin but enough other instruments to populate symphony orchestras around the globe for generations to come.
Many American musicians, feeling their art embattled at home, now take China’s rise to musical supremacy as a godsend, as if the cavalry was coming to the rescue. “China is integral to the future of classical music,” says conductor Michael Alexander, ...
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