April 14 is the 54th anniversary of the opening of Bye Bye Birdie on Broadway in 1960 – the first musical composed by Eastman alumnus Charles Strouse (BM ’47). Strouse went on to compose such hits as Golden Boy, Applause, and Annie, not to mention the theme song from TV’s All in the Family, and…
This Sunday Eastman presents a recital by this year’s winner of the annual scholarship awarded by the Rochester, New York Chapter, The Links, Incorporated. The Links Scholarship celebrates the talents and achievements of an African-American scholar musician. This year’s recipient is sophomore Carmen Livada Johnson-Pajaro (pictured), an Alabama native and a violin student of Ayano…
Lotte Lenya (1898-1981) sang in a voice once described as “an octave below laryngitis”, but she was one of the great musical theatre performers of the 20th century and one of the supreme interpreters of the songs of her husband, composer Kurt Weill (1900-1950). Weill and Lenya are shown in the photograph above; the photograph…
…for the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra’s presentation this week of Howard Hanson’s rarely performed opera (in fact, his only opera), Merry Mount. This three-act piece was written when Hanson was director of the Eastman School of Music, and premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 1934. The Rochester Philharmonic’s concert performance, conducted by Michael Christie, previews a…
Eastman musicians provide accompaniment for silent movies not just on DVD soundtracks, like Donald Hunsberger (see the Hunchback of Notre Dame posting before this one), but also live. This Thursday, April 10, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s landmark film The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), considered one of the great works of silent cinema, will be…
A new Blu-Ray DVD release of the 1923 silent movie The Hunchback of Notre Dame, starring Lon Chaney and (literally) a cast of thousands, features a background score by Donald Hunsberger (BM ’54, MM ’59, DMA ’63), Eastman professor emeritus of conducting and longtime director of the Eastman Wind Ensemble. In a New York…
Is it possible that we die “not for ourselves alone, but for each other”? This is one of the questions at the heart of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, this French composer’s most ambitious work and one of the great 20th-century operas. Set during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, the opera tells the true…
The great Italian writer Italo Calvino (pictured) is the inspiration for this year’s Benson Forum on Creativity, which brings together the music of Professor of Composition Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez and several Eastman student composers, the Eastman BroadBand ensemble (pictured below), and the bilingual Kairos Italy Theater troupe. They are collaborating for “If on a Winter’s Night…