Fandango Conference Reviewed in New Flamenco Magazine La Musa y El Duende, a new international digital magazine on flamenco (featuring our very own visiting scholar Meira Goldberg as a US correspondent), has just put out its first issue, which includes a review of the Foundation for Iberian Music’s fall conference on the fandango! The review begins on page 37. Click the image below to open the full PDF of the issue. Also have a look at April’s introductory issue (Issue 0) here!
Granados Celebration Coverage in Nuvol Digital Catalan magazine Nuvol has an article about Douglas Riva’s upcoming performance on April 29th at the Morgan Library and Museum, and about Granados’ time in New York and the Celebration at large. We are delighted to see the Foundation for Iberian Music’s many-time collaborator Benet Casablancas called “possibly the most important living Catalan composer” — “the Granados of the 21st century”! Incredible praise, with which we are inclined to agree. Riva’s upcoming performance is Friday, April 29th, at 7:30 pm. Tickets are $35 ($25 members). (click to download PDF)
Scruton Review in NY Review of Books The New York Review of Books recently published an engaging review of Roger Scruton’s new book, Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (Bloomsbury, 2016). The always provocative Scruton, as you will no doubt recall, was the guest speaker for the 2015 Lloyd Old and Constant Old lecture. He has written nearly fifty books, and the author of the review, Samuel Freeman, writes that Scruton is “after Richard Wollheim, the most significant British philosopher of aesthetics of the past fifty years.” Scruton’s new book is about modern schools of political thought, rather than music or architecture, but his political ideologies are never far from his aesthetics. Scruton engages what he considers to be the foundations of society, as Freeman notes, and music is a part of our foundational cultural institutions. Click the link above to read Freeman’s thoughtful criticism.
Fandango Conference Papers (Apr, 2015) Published in Música oral del Sur Proceedings from The Foundation for Iberian Music’s April 2015 conference and two day fandango extravaganza, “Spaniards, Indians, Africans, and Gypsies: The Global Reach of the Fandango in Song, Music, and Dance” (directed by visiting scholar K. Meira Goldberg), have been published in a special issue of Música oral del Sur (vol. 12, 2015). The full text of the issue may be read online, here. Look for additional English language publications from Cambridge Scholars in April, 2017! We will post details as they become available.
Enrique Granados in New York: Full Concert Online Full video of the March 10th concert, “From Barcelona with Passion: Enrique Granados in New York”—Perspectives Ensemble, directed by Ángel Gil-Ordoñez and joined by Douglas Riva and Anna de la Paz—is now available online! The concert concluded our daylong international Granados conference and featured the world premiere of esteemed composer Benet Casablancas’ work, Romanza sin palabras: Homage to Granados, which was composed especially for the Granados Celebration. Watch below!
Douglas Riva Solo Concert at the Morgan Library, Apr 29 Fans of romantic piano music will have one more opportunity this month to catch Douglas Riva performing Granados’ solo piano works, on April 29th, at the beautiful Morgan Library and Museum. Riva, for readers just joining us, is co-organizer of the Foundation for Iberian Music’s ongoing Granados centenary celebrations and one of the world’s foremost experts in the piano works of Granados. Don’t miss this chance to hear Granados as his music was meant to be heard. Program: Capricho español, DLR V:1 Cuentos de la juventud, DLR IV:2 Goyescas, DLR II:4 (select movements) Escenas románticas, DLR V:7 Barcarola, DLR V:4 Vals de concierto, DLR VII:9 Tickets are $35 ($25 members) 7:30 pm, Friday, April 29th The Morgan Library and Museum 225 Madison Ave (36th St) New York, NY 10016
Chamber Music of Granados at the Hispanic Society Next up in the docket for our continuing Granados Centennial festivities is a concert with Douglas Riva at the Hispanic Society of America, April 14th. Douglas will be performing selected chamber music of Enrique Granados with Erica Kiesewetter (violin) and Wolfram Koessel (cello). A reception will follow. Admission is free. Please RSVP at friends@hispanicsociety.org or 212-926 2234, Ext. 250. 6 pm, Thursday, April 14 Hispanic Society of America, Museum and Library Broadway between 155th and 156th Sts. (Photograph of Granados from the Hispanic Society collection.)
Surveilling the Imagination: Akhmatova, Shostakovich, and the Plight of the Artist in Stalinist Russia A seminar with Prof. Julia Trubikhina, Professor of Russian Literature at the Division of Russian and Slavic Studies at Hunter College, CUNY James Melo, musicologist for the Ensemble for the Romantic Century and Senior Editor at RILM Abstracts of Music Literature The seminar will examine the troubled relationship between artistic creation and totalitarianism through the perspective of the lives and careers of two emblematic artists working in Stalinist Russia: the poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) and the composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975). Akhmatova’s status as an icon of Russia culture will be discussed through an analysis of her lyrical and elegiac cycle Requiem. Shostakovich’s career as a composer who worked under the auspices of the regime will be examined in parallel with the different paths taken by Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev, addressing the relationship between art and politics and the power of art to convey political ideology. Thursday, April 21, 2015 5:30-7:30 CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave., Room 9205, 9th floor FREE ADMISSION For more information: jmelo@gc.cuny.edu; 212-817-8606 Presented by the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation, CUNY, and the Ensemble for the Romantic Century in connection with ERC’s theatrical concert The Heart is Not Made of Stone at BAM. To find out more about ERC’s theatrical concerts, visit our website: www.romanticcentury.org Julia Trubikhina received her PhD in Comparative Literature with a specialization in Slavic studies from New York University. Until Fall 2008 she taught in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Montclair State University where she also coordinated the Russian Program. From 2009, Julia Trubikhina teaches in the Department of Classics and Oriental Studies at Hunter College, CUNY, where she is currently Visiting Associate Professor of Russian in the Division of Russian and Slavic Studies. Her book The Translator’s Doubts: Vladimir Nabokov and the Ambiguity of Translation (Academic Studies Press, 2015) has been awarded the Samuel Schuman Prize in Nabokov Studies in 2016. In addition to many scholarly articles and reviews in academic journals, Julia Trubikhina (as Julia Trubikhina-Kunina) also published translations and contributed original poetry to Russian, European, and American anthologies and literary journals. She is currently working on two translation projects: editing and translating a bilingual edition of poetry by Vladimir Aristov, an important contemporary poet, for Ugly Duckling Presse (forthcoming Spring 2016), and a volume of poetry and prose by a seminal contemporary woman poet and writer Elena Shvarts. James Melo has written extensively for scholarly journals and music magazines in Brazil, Uruguay, Austria, and the United States, and has been invited to participate as a panel discussant in conferences in Indiana, New York, and Canada. He has written program notes for several concerts at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, and for over 60 recordings on the Chesky, Naxos, Paulus, and Musikus labels, among others. He is the New York correspondent for the magazine Sinfonica in Uruguay, and senior editor at RILM (Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale) at CUNY. Mr. Melo is the program annotator for the recording of Villa-Lobos’s complete piano music and Camargo Guarnieri’s complete piano concertos on Naxos. He has written program notes for all of ERC’s original productions and authored several scripts.
Miguel Roig-Francoli World Premiere, Apr 12 Spanish composer Miguel Roig-Francoli has an upcoming world premiere in NYC! Roig-Francoli was the recipient of the Foundation for Iberian Music’s Composer’s Commission in 2010, for which he wrote Songs of the Infinite (premiered by Adam Kent and Jennifer Roig-Francoli at Carnegie Hall). Roig-Francoli has received many awards both for his composition and his teaching, and he has been described as a pioneer of postmodernism in Spanish music. His new work, Six Preludes after Chopin, will premiere at The Green Space on April 12, 2016, as a part of a solo recital by pianist Soyeon Kate Lee. Lee is a critically lauded pianist who has placed in several international piano competitions, including 1st place at the Juilliard Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition in 2001. Lee is also a student at our very own Graduate Center, pursuing a DMA in piano performance with Richard Goode and Ursula Oppens. Tickets are only $20 and available through the Concert Artist’s Guild. 7:30 pm, Tuesday, April 12 The Green Space 44 Charlton St New York, NY 10013