Deceptively Simple

Next door in The Onion‘s A.V. Club, Steven Hyden throws down a prov0cative test for musical greatness: Five consecutive albums of surpassing greatness. Those are my words; he never comes out and says whether the albums have to be classics, or just great, or can be very good if at least one is a classic. [...]

The International Contemporary Ensemble has long looked at boundaries, decided they weren’t in quite the right place, and moved them several football fields away. They, and Claire Chase, the executive director who’s inspired her own hashtag, have done this again with ICELab. From the outside, it looks like a university residence turned inside out and [...]

The International Contemporary Concert gave a memorial concert last week, a rare occurrence and one that doesn’t often happen with contemporary classical music. The occasion was the murder of violist Omar Hernández-Hidalgo in June. He had been kidnapped four days earlier, and was found in the trunk of a car. Hernández-Hidalgo was 39, and an [...]

Last week, a package arrived containing CDs at the loading dock at work. These were discs that are to be sold at Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts, and I had to get them up to the store manager. This is a regular occurrence in my line of work, the arrival of several pieces of plastic which [...]

This is probably an unfair entry for the Worst CD Ever Made Award, since Ezra Pound was a poet and not a composer, and because the performances are as spirited and as dedicated as one could ask. But what are they spiriting and dedicating themselves to? Pound’s throwback medievalism from two operas Le Testament and [...]