Eastman Journal: Page 40
Musical Links to the Community
April 11, 2014This 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 […]
Read More...A Lotte Great Performances
April 10, 2014Lotte 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 […]
Read More...Merriment is mounting …
April 9, 2014…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 […]
Read More...Old Film, Brand-New Sounds
April 8, 2014Eastman 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 […]
Read More...Hunsberger Scores Against “Notre Dame”
April 8, 2014A 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 […]
Read More...Martyrdom and Memories
April 3, 2014Is 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 […]
Read More...Musical Tales of a Winter’s Night
April 3, 2014The 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 […]
Read More...Students and Teachers Band Together
March 26, 2014Last Sunday’s concert in Kodak Hall by the United States Army Field Band not only brought several Eastman alumni back to the their alma mater, it gave them the opportunity to perform alongside their former teachers, who joined the band for several numbers. Here are photos of Professor of Horn Peter Kurau with his student […]
Read More...Britten by Virtuosi
March 25, 2014The British composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) was such a renowned figure that he was featured on the cover of Time magazine when he was only in his thirties. His centenary in 2013 was celebrated worldwide; Eastman joined in with performances of his opera The Rape of Lucretia in the fall and his massive War Requiem […]
Read More...Sending in Sondheim, with Eastman Opera Theatre
March 22, 2014March 22 is the 84th birthday of one of the great American theater composers and lyricists: Stephen Sondheim, who was born in New York City in 1930. Sondheim got his start on Broadway as the lyricist of West Side Story (with Leonard Bernstein, 1957) and Gypsy (with Jule Styne, 1959), and has written many award-winning […]
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