The Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival's commitment to new music plays out throughout the two-week event, but a showcase concert also draws a tight frame around a resident composer. more...

Of the many striking images choreographer Laurie Eisenhower creates in her newly conceived "The Rite of Spring," a sweeping parable about the double-edged sword of human "progress," one in particular continues to resonate in the aftermath of Saturday's Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival premiere. more...

In 1913, Igor Stravinsky changed the world with "The Rite of Spring." The music's savage attack, irregular rhythms, harmonic dissonance, formal freedom and electrifying sonorities pummeled to death the last vestiges of the played-out romanticism of the 19th Century. more...

Anybody know how to say "time to party" in Russian? The 19th annual Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival opens this weekend, inaugurating a mad dash of 19 concerts in 16 days in eight venues throughout metro Detroit -- with Russian music the dominant soundtrack for this year's programming. more...

The Russians are coming, and in a big way, to the 19th annual Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, which opens its two-week run Saturday night at Seligman Performing Arts Center in Beverly Hills. more...

Igor Stravinsky’s "The Rite of Spring" is widely recognized as a revolutionary landmark of 20th Century music. Orchestras play it all the time, but it was famously conceived as a ballet. Yet when was the last time you actually saw it danced? more...

The Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival has always cultivated a progressive profile, but the 18th annual event, which reached its apex Saturday, offered more adventure than any previous edition. more...

The best players don't always get the best gigs. This has always been a truism of the music business, since talent is rarely the sole arbiter of success -- luck, personality, temperament, timing, friends in high places, the vagaries of the market and hucksterism can all color the equation. more...

Chen Yi and Zhou Long were born in China in 1953 and have lived in the United States for more than 25 years. They are among the most vital composers on the scene -- Zhou won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for music -- and part of an influential generation of Chinese-born composers who have had a profound impact by fusing the Western classical tradition with their Chinese heritage. more...

An appealing array of repertory favorites and contemporary works - including some by the composers in residence Chen Yi and Zhou Long - will be performed by top-notch performers like the pianist Jeremy Denk and the ensemble eighth blackbird. more...

In terms of ambition, the annual Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival has always reached for the stars. In its 18th year, however, the festival will look directly to the heavens for inspiration, as well as to the earth and spiritual dimensions. more...

Hey, look who's here -- Leonard Slatkin!
The music director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra made a welcome cameo at Saturday's big finish of the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, conducting Samuel Barber's neglected "Capricorn Concerto" for flute, oboe, trumpet and strings. more...

The Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival champions living composers through an annual residency that has showcased such front-rank voices as John Corigliano, William Bolcom, Elliott Carter and Stephen Hartke, as well as leading younger lights such as this year’s entry, Lera Auerbach. On another front, the festival promotes young ensembles through its Shouse Institute. more...

The 17th annual Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival opened Saturday night with a birthday chorus. It wasn't exactly "Happy Birthday," but an outpouring of the lyrical and poetic music of Robert Schumann, Frederic Chopin and Samuel Barber. more...

Lera Auerbach didn't know when she woke up in a New York hotel on July 3, 1991, that the rest of the day would change the course of her life. At 17, the Russian-born prodigy, a pianist and composer, had reached the end of a short tour and was preparing to return to the Soviet Union the following morning. But Auerbach, a woman of instinct and intuition, had been feeling pangs of discontent. That morning they flowered into an epiphany: She had to defect. more...

Metro Detroit has offered important career boosts to a striking number of rising young chamber ensembles. The Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival's Shouse Institute, which helps emerging groups leap from school to professional careers, has introduced Eighth Blackbird, Claremont Trio and the Pacifica, Jupiter, Parker, Enso and Biava string quartets. All are having fine careers. Some, especially the new music ensemble Eighth Blackbird and the Pacifica, have become stars. more...

As Leonard Slatkin progresses into his first full season as music director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, his main declared objective is to create a focused and distinctive sound. To judge from the resonant, gutsy, sharp-edged performance heard Thursday night at Orchestra Hall, Slatkin is already well along the way to that goal. more...

Along with Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber was probably the most performed living American composer in the middle of the 20th Century, and several of his works remain beloved concert hall staples. Yet Detroit Symphony Orchestra music director Leonard Slatkin asked an intriguing question more...

Each Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival takes on its own personality, and the 16th annual edition, which came to a close after two weeks and 17 concerts with two immensely satisfying programs Saturday and Sunday, carried more contemporary snap than any previous edition. more...

The Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, which reached its midpoint Saturday, is celebrating the 200th birthday of Felix Mendelssohn. His curious status in the pantheon gives the theme, “Mendelssohn and the Dawn of Romanticism,” hints of proselytizing. more...

Contemporary music is a top priority at the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, where the annual resident composers have been some of the most distinguished names in the field, including this year's entry, Stephen Hartke. more...

There's a lot to like about Stephen Hartke's music, but the first thing to say is that his pieces have the best titles in the business. Take, for example, the whimsical moniker "Oh Them Rats Is Mean in My Kitchen," which Hartke borrowed from "Maltese Cat Blues" by the early Texas blues singer and guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson. more...

They grow up fast. Seven years ago, the four fresh-faced students in the Biava Quartet made their local debut at the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival as part of the Shouse Institute, a training program for young ensembles. Next week, the Biava returns to the festival with a reputation as one of the best young quartets on the scene and such a busy itinerary that it recently has had to turn down work. more...

One way to think about Stephen Hartke is that he represents the triumph of the post-everything classical composer. more...

At 56, Stephen Hartke has matured into one of America's finest classical composers. While his fame has been rising swiftly in recent years with high-profile premieres and recordings, he remains regrettably unfamiliar to much of the concertgoing public. His reputation is about to get a boost in metro Detroit, with the 16th annual Great Lakes Chamber Festival today announcing its performers and Hartke as its resident composer. more...

The 15th annual Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival in June will honor four distinguished American composers celebrating their 70th birthdays in 2008 -- William Bolcom, Joan Tower, John Harbison and John Corigliano. more...

Wow! When did June get so busy? The Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival has long kept the end of the month from turning into a dead zone for classical music in metro Detroit. more...

When French composer Darius Milhaud visited New York in 1922, he did what nearly all European composers did between the wars when in America: He made a trip to Harlem to hear authentic jazz and promptly tried to write music infused with this distinctly American revolution in sound. more...

The Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival traditionally features a concert devoted solely to its resident composer for the year. It's always a treat, but Monday's traversal of all four of Leon Kirchner's string quartets - a 57-year autobiographical arch from 1949 to 2006, with the 88-year-old composer in attendance - was one for the ages. more...

The Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival's eclectic program Saturday surveyed 200 years dating back to a Beethoven set of variations for cello and piano. There was also Schumann's effusively romantic Piano Quartet, Op. 47 (1842), five songs by William Grant Still from the 20th Century that channel syncopated African-American vernacular, and resident composer Leon Kirchner's Piano Trio No. 2 (1993), up-to-the-minute modernism. more...

NEW YORK -- Jeremy Denk sits at the Steinway in his Upper West Side apartment sipping tea and twisting the tailcq-ojackson of the inexhaustible subject of musical interpretation.
Denk, a featured artist at the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, is exploring how he makes decisions about phrasing, tempo, dynamics, articulation , color and meaning based on the cues the composer writes - or does not write - in the score. more...

The 14th annual Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival gets under way Saturday, inaugurating a two-week run of 17 concerts throughout metro Detroit. The festival features national chamber music stars and a diverse menu of music that includes an intense focus on Beethoven and festival resident composer Leon Kirchner. more...

At a lecture he was introduced to "Pierrot Lunaire" (1912), a beguiling and beautiful nightmare of expressionism by Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg, whose revolutionary atonal style made him one of the most influential composers of the century, deified and reviled in equal measure.
"That was the music I wanted to write," says Kirchner, resident composer of the 14th annual Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, which opens Saturday. "It was different from anything I had ever heard and it was immensely attractive to me." more...

At 88, the American composer Leon Kirchner is having his moment in the sun. His work is the focus of a season-long survey at New York's Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and now metro Detroit is getting in on the action. more...

At the end of the opening of the Fontana Chamber Arts 2006 Summer Music Festival Wednesday night, there was no doubt that the Ariel Quartet was the star of the evening. more...

The 13th annual Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, which closed over the weekend after two immensely satisfying weeks, offered the unexpected in nearly every concert. What was particularly inspiring was that the adventure came filtered through so many different delivery mechanisms -- a diverse menu of new music, inspired individual performances and the interplay of the familiar and unfamiliar on thoughtful programs devised by artistic director James Tocco. more...

The recording session isn't scheduled to begin until 6, but it's 5:20 Thursday afternoon, and musicians are warming up onstage at Seligman Performing Arts Center in Beverly Hills. Oboist Don Baker is trying out reeds in search of the perfect piece of cane. He'll need it. more...

Tuesday's Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival concert was akin to a World Cup match pitting the traditional Austro-Germanic powerhouse led by hall-of-famers Mozart and Brahms against an upstart New World team of composers heavily invested in South America. more...

Much of what makes the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival such a vital part of Detroit's cultural landscape came together at Saturday's concert, the midpoint of the two-week festival. Artistic director James Tocco's satisfying program connected old and new music in meaningful ways while tying together the themes girding this year's festival: the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth, a 100th birthday huzzah for Dmitri Shostakovich and an introduction to a young Chinese-born composer, Gao Ping. more...

The Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival has always featured an exemplary mix of new music, familiar fare and rediscoveries from neglected corners of the repertory. But artistic director (and pianist) James Tocco has added several twists to the formula more...

Composer Gabriela Lena Frank and Gao Ping grew up separated by the Pacific Ocean and a cultural divide that stretches from the progressive environs of Berkeley, Calif., to communist China. Yet Frank and Gao, whose music will be featured at the upcoming Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, are kindred spirits more...

Birthday tributes to Mozart and Dmitri Shostakovich and feature roles for four contemporary composers will highlight the 13th annual Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival in June. In a break with tradition, however, the festival will not name a resident composer for 2006. more...

Sometimes it seemed as if fate had it in for the 12th annual Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, which stared down one crisis after another with grit, grace and great music more...

Elliott Carter, the resident composer of the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival and amazingly at the top of his game at age 96, is one of those high modernists often blamed for driving a wedge between classical music and the public more...

Given the pluralist age in which we live, it's frustrating that the vast majority of mainstream concerts, if they bother to include any new music at all, restrict the menu to a single piece tucked in the middle of the program to keep recalcitrant patrons from leaving before the Beethoven more...

Never one to play it safe, the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival has been taking even greater risks. The results have been enormously gratifying artistically and are part of the greater fight to keep classical music growing and relevant in an era in which presenting concerts of Brahms and Beethoven is not enough more...

Frank Sinatra used to toast his audience with a highball and a quip: "May you live to be 100 and may the last voice you hear be mine." At 96, Elliott Carter is taking aim at the century mark, too, and he just might note the occasion with yet another premiere more...

Sometimes composers find inspiration in the most profound manifestations of the human condition, or in the misty memories of youth, or in the longing for friends and lovers, or in travels to exotic lands. And sometimes it's a parakeet dressed in a cowboy outfit more...

The jazz violinist chose a shot of wild horses taken during a Brazilian vacation. The jazz bassist, a picture of his late mother. One classical composer chose a picture of himself as a child on his tricycle. Another classical composer chose a picture of a parakeet posing as a cowboy. And as inspirations for compositions that are interpreted by the Elements String Quartet, they comprised what one Washington Post critic hailed as "the liveliest new-music concert I’ve heard in ages. more...
 

'The Music of Charles Ives'
FOUR STARS out of 4 stars
"Play your own way," the innovative jazz composer-pianist Thelonious Monk once said. "Don't play what the public wants -- you play what you want and let the public pick up what you are doing, even if does take them 15, 20 years." . more...

Pianist James Tocco only played on one work on Saturday night's opening concert of the 11th annual Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, but his fingerprints were all over an inventive program that juxtaposed rarities from the Russian and French repertoire by Stravinsky, Glazunov, Rachmaninoff and Chausson. . more...

Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival
ICONOCLASTIC American composer Charles Ives influenced today's composers with his dissonant music and use of American folk tunes in classical works more...

Charles Ives wrote music that was sprawling, cacophonous, thorny and dissonant but also filled with New England hymns, patriotic songs, backyard tunes and band marches. Ives' music is filled with contrariness and contradiction. But then, so is America more...

Igor Stravinsky's "The Soldier's Tale" ("L'Histoire du Soldat") has
become something of a house anthem for the Great Lakes Chamber
Music Festival, which celebrated the closing weekend of its 10th
anniversary season with a fully staged performance of this addictively
astringent union of music, dance and theater more...

One of the most satisfying facets of Monday's Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival concert devoted to the polyglot composer David Baker was that so much of the music heard could have flowed only from Baker's pen more...

Does eroticism have a place in the concert hall? Of course it does. more...

Composer David Baker has been around a long time and enjoyed a good deal of success. At age 71, this affable, gentle-spoken African-American musician and teacher also has seen his share of rough spots. He knows better than to take recognition for granted. But right now, as composer in residence for this summer's Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, Baker is basking in the warm light of celebrity. more...

Like, how can you tell when a violist is playing out of tune?
Answer: The bow is moving more...

NEW YORK -- When the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival made its modest debut in 1994 with six concerts, nobody could have predicted that a decade later the idea would yield a 15-day, 20-concert extravaganza. Nor could anyone have forseen a concert as ambitious, star-studded or commanding as that which opened the 10th anniversary season on Saturday more...

NEW YORK -- The Emerson String Quartet is the greatest string quartet on the planet
more...

In a coup for the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, the Emerson String Quartet will help celebrate the 10th anniversary of the event in June more...

FOUR STARS out of 4 stars The ninth Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival opened Saturday on such a note of excellence that the only negative I can think of is that the concert may have inadvertently set a standard impossible to sustain during the rest of the two-week festival. The concert pulsated with committed performances of unusual repertoire, fresh readings of standard fare and thrilling work by festival regulars and newcomers like the Elements Quartet more...

THREE STARS out of 4 stars
Contemporary music has always been centralto the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, but with the dynamic new-music sextet Eighth Blackbird bringing its expansive repertoire to this year's festival, the menu is broader than usual more...

THREE STARS out of 4 stars
The persistence of memory has always been a powerful narcotic for composers, inspiring a broad range of dreamlike music rooted in autobiography but transformed by craft and creativity. But whose autobiography and to what end? more...

THREE STARS out of 4 stars
Among the many reasons to celebrate the young new-music sextet Eighth Blackbird is that the group has not only allied itself with established composers but has also sought out composers of its own generation more...

FOUR STARS out of 4 stars
The 25-year survey of John Harbison's music presented Monday by the Great Lakes Festival illuminated the diverse influences that have inspired the festival's resident composer and the steady evolution of his music. more...