When a Critic Hosts the Premiere
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Zachary Woolfe
February 14, 2020
“Please silence your cellphones.”
There are few phrases I hear more often in my life as a music critic. But it was strange — like a child playing dress-up — to speak the sentence myself, and in the incongruous setting of my own living room on a rainy evening earlier this week…
Read MoreThe Crossing choir (Donald Nally, conductor) premieres a beautifully filmed video (by Four/Ten Media) of “To The West”, one movement from Michael Gordon and filmmaker Bill Morrison’s upcoming work Montaña — a project unfolding over the course of four years.
Each summer the artists meet in Big Sky, Montana to work on movements that will ultimately become a spatial work for a cappella choir and film…
Read Morelisten to the broadcast:
BBC Radio 3 The New Music Show’s Kate Molleson introduces the world premiere performance by Paul Hillier and the Theatre of Voices at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany of A Western Michael Gordon’s latest choral work, a nod to American cowboy movies where the town marshal meets the bad guys.
Read MoreOn May 26, Spoleto Festival USA presented three powerful City Symphonies by Michael Gordon and filmmaker Bill Morrison, performed for the first time as a trilogy by the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra.
Gotham (2004) for New York, Dystopia (2008) for Los Angeles, and El Sol Caliente (2015) for Miami Beach celebrate the character of place and how it evolves, pairing image and music to share the energy, chaos and beauty of urban life…
Read MoreThe PBS documentary “Symphony for Nature” is broadcast nationwide tells the story of the premiere of Michael Gordon’s inspirational work Natural History for orchestra, chorus, and Native American drummers.
The full recording of Natural History has been released on Cantaloupe Music in conjunction with the broadcast of the documentary. Click here to stream the full recording.
Gordon’s work, inspired by Crater Lake National Park in Oregon and commissioned by the Britt Orchestra as part of the 100th anniversary of America’s National Park Service, premiered the morning of July 29, 2016, on the rim of the lake with musicians spatially situated around the site…
Read MoreNYT Review: A B-Movie Starlet Becomes an Opera Diva in ‘Acquanetta’
By Seth Colter Walls
January 10, 2018
A large screen looms over the stage. Projected onto it is a black-and-white close-up on an eyeball, fluttering in a state of nervous distress.
An overture, powered by distorted electric guitar and staccato strings, accompanies this sooty B-movie-style image. A choir grasps toward high-pitched wails…
Read MoreFrom January 9 – 14, the Prototype Festival presents a new, commissioned, chamber version of Michael Gordon’s opera Acquanetta at the Gelsey Kirkland Arts Center in DUMBO, Brooklyn. Based on a 1940’s B-movie horror flick called Captive Wild Woman, starring an enigmatic actress and former cheesecake model named Acquanetta, the opera’s libretto is written by Deborah Artman.
Stunning and exotic, Acquanetta played the untameable and gorgeous creation resulting from a mad scientist’s experiments on an ape, a role the young actress sizzled in and played so well a sequel was soon in the can…
Read MoreOn Saturday July 1 The Crossing Choir premieres Michael Gordon’s concert-length work, Anonymous Man. The text is drawn from Gordon’s experiences living in a changing neighborhood on a street called Desbrosses in Lower Manhattan, meeting Julia Wolfe (to whom he is married), raising a family, and especially encounters with two homeless men who lived across the street.
The piece reaches a surprising epiphany — after the bombing of the neighboring World Trade Center, and a few years later when one of the homeless men dies and Gordon watches the outpouring of sympathy from the community — that evokes Lincoln’s funeral train going through the streets of Manhattan, including Desbrosses St…
Read MoreIn May, Michael Gordon receives orchestral premieres: The Unchanging Sea (Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra) and CORPUS (Ballett Zürich)
On May 19, the Rotterdam Philharmonic with pianist Tomoko Mukaiyama and conductor Bas Wiegers gives the Dutch premiere of Gordon’s The Unchanging Sea, with a new film by Bill Morrison.
Co-commissioned with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, this is the fifth work with orchestra for Gordon and Morrison, whose fourteen collaborations span nearly 20 years…
Read MoreTimber Remixed
with Mantra Percussion
now available on Cantaloupe Music
featuring remixes by Squarepusher, Oneohtrix Point Never, Tim Hecker, Fennesz, Hauschka, Greg Saunier & more…
2-disc set includes Mantra Percussion’s live recording of Timber from the 2014 Bang on a Can Marathon
Also available on limited edition 180g vinyl with six remixes + download card
Now available on CD & vinyl and digitally on iTunes
Watch a video premiere of Squarepusher’s remix on Vice.com
“Beyond the ever-shifting rhythmic crosscurrents that give the music its vigor and hypnotic intensity, ‘Timber’ also plays on tones unique to each plank…
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