David T. Little News

Miller Theatre ends its 2018-2019 Composer Portraits series with a bang: Its David T. Little Composer Portrait on April 18 pairs Haunt of Last Nightfall, a "ghost play in two acts," with the New York premiere of AGENCY, a string quartet that questions our autonomy in society.

Chicago Opera Theater's Orli and Bill Staley Music Director Lidiya Yankovskaya and Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson General Director Ashley Magnus today announced the plans for the company's 47th season, to include productions of two exciting contemporary operas, a Chicago premiere by Rachmaninov, and the company's second world premiere commission. Yankovskaya will conduct each of these Chicago Opera Theater (COT) productions.

Grammy-winning new-music choir, The Crossing, announces a program change to its current concert season with For Joe on Saturday, March 30, 2019 at 8pm at The Crossing's home, The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill. For Joe honors the life of Joseph Flummerfelt, the preeminent choral conductor of our time who passed away on March 1. Flummerfelt was a former teacher of conductor Donald Nally and together they wrote the 2011 book Conversations With Joseph Flummerfelt: Thoughts on Conducting, Music, and Musicians.

Baruch Performing Arts Center and Fresh Squeezed Opera will co-present the NYC Premiere of composer Huang Ruo and librettist Bao-Long Chu's one-act chamber opera Bound in a new production by Ashley Tata. Performances from April 13-18, 2019 at Baruch Performing Arts Center, 55 Lexington Avenue (25th Street between Third and Lexington Avenues), NYC. Tickets are $16-36 and may be purchased at www.baruch.cuny.edu/bpac.  

Segerstrom Center for the Arts welcomes the Center debut performance of the Grammy®-winning quartet Third Coast Percussion on April 5, 2019 at 8:00pm in a program that will feature the West Coast Premiere of a new work composed by Philip Glass. Quartet members include percussionists David Skidmore, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin, and Sean Connors.

A Pulitzer Prize finalist, Guggenheim fellow, and Radcliffe alum, Kate Soper's music has been described as 'exquisitely quirky' (The New York Times) and 'epic' (WQXR). As a performer, she has been praised as a 'dazzling vocalist' (The New Yorker) and likened to 'Lucille Ball reinterpreted by Linda Blair' (Pitchfork). 

The San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) today announces the appointment of baritone Matthew Worth to its voice faculty. Worth will lead a full studio at SFCM beginning in Fall 2019, joining the voice department led by chair Cesar Ulloa. Worth's appointment comes just after the announcement of Rhoslyn Jones joining SFCM's faculty.

The New School's Mannes School of Music announces their Spring 2019 concert season. The season continues to set Mannes apart as a music school with a distinct appetite and commitment to new and experimental work.

OPERA America, the national service organization for opera and the nation's leading champion for American opera, is pleased to announce the recipients of its first-ever Civic Practice Grants, supported by OPERA America's Opera Fund endowment.

The Crossing and Donald Nally have won the 2019 Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance for their recording of Lansing McLoskey's Zealot Canticles. The award was presented yesterday, February 10, 2019, at the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. This marks the Philadelphia new-music choir's second consecutive Grammy in the category, previously winning the 2018 Grammy for Gavin Bryars' The Fifth Century with PRISM Saxophone Quartet on ECM. The Crossing's recording of Thomas Lloyd's Bonhoeffer (Albany 2016) was nominated for the 2017 Grammy in the same category.

New York's PROTOTYPE OperaTheatreNow Festival returns for its seventh season from January 5 to the 13th and the one thing that you can't ask about it is “What's new?” That's not because there's nothing to answer. On the contrary--there's too much, in style, in content, in the sizes of its venues: This year's Festival is larger than ever, with a dozen works, 24 composerlibrettists and over 150 collaborators.

Recent Grammy Award-winners Third Coast Percussion return to Liquid Music with new works by two incredible musical minds: the iconic American composer Philip Glass and the pop polymath Devonte Hynes, a.k.a. Blood Orange. Glass's new work, written for Third Coast Percussion and co-commissioned by Liquid Music, is his first ever for percussion ensemble. Hynes, who has also become a Glass collaborator in recent years, brings his "dense modern pop with roots in hip-hop, R&B and NYC culture" (The Guardian) to an entirely new sound world in his piece for Third Coast Percussion.

On Friday, December 14, 2018 at 8:00 p.m. at the Church of the Holy Trinity in Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, The Crossing gives its annual Christmas concert, The Crossing @ Christmas, presented by Annenberg Center Live. The concert is in memorial of Jeffrey Dinsmore, co-founder of The Crossing, and features an evening-length world premiere by Gavin Bryars, composer of The Fifth Century, for which The Crossing won the 2018 Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance.

Winner of the 2018 Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance, The Crossing, led by conductor Donald Nally, presents The Tower and The Garden today, October 27, 2018 at 8:00 p.m. at The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill. The evening features two world premieres, including Gregory Spears' The Tower and the Garden and Philadelphia composer James Primosch's new work Carthage. The concert also includes other works written for The Crossing, Joel Puckett's dizzying I enter the earth (2015), and Toivo Tulev's A child said, what is the grass? (2015).

Baruch Performing Arts Center is pleased to present the world premiere of Words on the Street, a hybrid music-theater event that wrestles with power, complacency, and excess. Originally written by Anna Rabinowitz as a series of poems, Words on the Street has been transformed into a unique production, collaboratively conceived and developed by Rabinowitz, director Kristin Marting, the late composer Matt Marks (1980-2018), and video designer Lianne Arnold. In response to the untimely death of Matt Marks, a community of composers, Lainie Fefferman, John Glover, Mary Kouyoumdjian, David T. Little, Kamala Sankaram, Caroline Shaw, and Randall Woolf have contributed additional compositions to create a highly original sonic world for the work. Music direction is by Mila Henry.

PROTOTYPE: Opera/Theatre/Now announces full programming for the seventh annual festival of fresh opera-theatre & music-theatre, running January 5-13, 2019 and featuring ten presentations that "shift the whole paradigm of what opera is and can be" (New York Observer).

Baruch Performing Arts Center is pleased to present the world premiere of Words on the Street, a hybrid music-theater event that wrestles with power, complacency, and excess. Originally written by Anna Rabinowitz as a series of poems, Words on the Street has been transformed into a unique production, collaboratively conceived and developed by Rabinowitz, director Kristin Marting, the late composer Matt Marks (1980-2018), and video designer Lianne Arnold. In response to the untimely death of Matt Marks, a community of composers, Lainie Fefferman, John Glover, Mary Kouyoumdjian, David T. Little, Kamala Sankaram, Caroline Shaw, and Randall Woolf have contributed additional compositions to create a highly original sonic world for the work. Music direction is by Mila Henry.

On October 27 and 31, LA Opera presents a special Halloween treat for cinephiles and opera lovers alike: a screening of Carl Theodor Dreyer's suspenseful and surreal 1932 cinematic masterpiece Vampyr, featuring the world premiere of a new musical score by Joby Talbot performed live at the spectacular Theatre at Ace Hotel.

The story bridges the dichotomy between the civilian perception of war and the conditions experienced by soldiers. It shows the reason why veterans often choose not to tell their war stories to anyone who has never been to war. As The Soldier says repeatedly: "I never talk about this." Bill Morrison's film illustrates the resulting loss of innocence and the gnawing fear brought about by living in danger.