Open Ears Bimonthly: March/April 2024
Featuring a quick jaunt through Holy Week, two new American operas, and a celebration of spring.
Spring has arrived! (Well, in Northeast Ohio at least. The weather has finally decided to warm up after dragging its feet for several weeks.) And with a new season comes a new bimonthly playlist!
There are lots of fun things in this edition, which exclusively features new recordings. Here are some highlights:
After a buoyant opener by esteemed American composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, the playlist takes a short trip through some Holy Week-inspired recordings, featuring performances by countertenor Andreas Scholl, Apollo’s Fire, and the Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge
Two tracks from a fantastic new recording dedicated to the music of Julia Perry and Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson (an early contender for one of my favorite albums of the year, perhaps…?) 👀
A taste of Benjamin Britten’s seasonally-appropriate (and woefully underperformed) Spring Symphony
Debussy’s Jeux, as performed by the Orchestre de Paris and the young conductor everyone is talking about right now, Klaus Mäkelä
The first movement of Ligeti’s Violin Concerto followed by the first movement of Unsuk Chin’s Violin Concerto No. 1 (both contain sonic similarities—which make sense as Chin studied with Ligeti—but each is an utterly distinct and amazing work on its own)
Some music from Bartók’s wonderful (and also sadly underperformed) ballet The Wooden Prince
A track from conductor Dalia Stasevska’s new recording project, Dalia’s Mixtape
Mozart as sung by the incredible South African soprano Golda Schultz
A short scene from Paul Moravec’s spooky 2016 operatic adaption of The Shining
Yet another “Schoenberg as lounge music” arrangement courtesy of Aaron Wyanski (you can’t escape it!) 😝
The playlist ends with a spotlight on John Adams’s 2017 Gold Rush opera Girls of the Golden West. After an orchestral “outtake” from the opera (recorded by Marin Alsop and the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra), I’ve included some highlights from a just-released recording of the opera, with the composer leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic and a stellar cast of singers in his searing (and timely) score.