Walter Zimmermann’s music has a rare combination of stasis and flow. It wanders without being lost. It communicates calm curiosity and curious calm. Many composers have written music about nature, but Zimmermann’s is one of the few musics that seems as if nature itself could have created it.  In April, he turned 75. On Friday, […]

The post Open Garten appeared first on VAN Magazine.

Nearly three years ago, Maria Kalesnikava, the Belarusian flutist, curator, politician, and icon of the resistance against the Lukaschenko regime, was sentenced to 11 years in prison for alleged “conspiracy with the intent of illegal power seizure” and “founding and leadership of an extremist organization,” in a case widely considered to be politically motivated. In […]

The post Waiting Outside appeared first on VAN Magazine.

The pianist Pavel Kushnir died on July 27 at the age of 39 in a prison in Birobidzhan, Russian Federation, apparently of complications from a days-long dry hunger strike. In late May, Kushnir was arrested by FSB officers on charges of incitement to terrorism. On his YouTube channel, Kushnir, under the username Inoagent Mulder—he was […]

The post The Truth Was Out There appeared first on VAN Magazine.

The composer Wolfgang Rihm died on the night of July 27 at the age of 72. His friend, the Swiss composer Dieter Ammann, was in close contact with him until close to the very end.  The two artists have known each other for nearly 30 years. Rihm once described Ammann’s music as “never idle, always […]

The post “Everything He Touched Became Rihm” appeared first on VAN Magazine.

A piece of clay dropping in a ceramic pot is the centerpiece of Leilehua Lanzilotti’s sound installation (single-channel video directed by Lanzilotti, cinematography by Gahlord Dewald) in the “Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within” exhibit at The Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York.  Lanzilotti, a 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist in music, released their latest album, “the sky […]

The post Places with a Heartbeat appeared first on VAN Magazine.

At Wigmore Hall in November, a solo piano recital by Vijay Iyer was like a set of rough clouds in a humid summer, breaking in brief, awesome moments. Hearing “Love in Exile” at the Barbican a few months earlier, the trio (Iyer, Arooj Aftab and Shahzad Ismaily) made a thick haze like a hot-warm drunkenness. […]

The post Fantasies, Urgencies appeared first on VAN Magazine.

In 2022, I sang Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem” at the Royal Albert Hall. During the performance a spotlit figure caught my eye, moving his hands dynamically and expressively with the musical flow, but who was neither a conductor, nor a singer, nor an instrumentalist. That figure was Paul Whittaker: a Deaf musician who uses British […]

The post The Reverse Conductor appeared first on VAN Magazine.

When I first heard the music of Tom Johnson at a concert in Basel in 2013, I was immediately struck by its humor and unassuming simplicity. In contrast to the weighty works of the late 20th-century European avant-garde, Johnson’s music was a breath of fresh air. There were no hidden layers. It was transparent and […]

The post “It’s A Gift to Be Simple” appeared first on VAN Magazine.

On July 12, the label BMOP/sound of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project will release its 100th recording. BMOP—pronounced “BE-mop”—was founded in 1996 by conductor Gil Rose, and has since filled an essential gap in Boston’s classical music scene, performing new and new-ish music between the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s rarified renditions of canonical repertoire, new-music gigs […]

The post Reacting in a Continuum appeared first on VAN Magazine.

The conductor and singer Barbara Hannigan, 53, is possessed of such irrevocable musicianship and presence that, during her May 9 recital of works by Messiaen and John Zorn at the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, with the pianist Bertrand Chamayou, I caught myself in the casual assumption that she was immortal, like Messiaen’s Catholic God […]

The post A Bit More Darkness appeared first on VAN Magazine.