In the News

“Anybody out there know what Afrofuturism is?” Bill T. Jones asked in the middle of Times Square on Saturday night.

Jones is, among other things, the artistic director of New York Live Arts, an experimental performing arts center in Chelsea. It was in this capacity that he appeared on Saturday to discuss a free outdoor performance of “The Motherboard Suite,” a movement and musical work he directed for the center’s Live Ideas festival.

Over the last two decades, jazz fans have heard pianist Aaron Diehl play inventive jazz solos with Wynton Marsalis and Cécile McLorin Salvant. A different sort of audience has heard him play George Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F with the New York Philharmonic and the music of Philip Glass at Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Pianist Aaron Diehl enchanted Newport Music Festival patrons with pairings of delightful miniature vignettes in the specially constructed music tent on the lawn of the Breakers Mansion last Sunday evening. Diehl’s seemingly random series of small offerings in fact took on a grand master plan in what he jokingly referred to as his “pandemic playlist.” In his spare time, the highly acclaimed pianist enjoys flying; in the air he “gets the big picture,” while on the ground as a pilot he attends to all manner of pre and post flight details.

Introducing her rapturous and rhapsodic album Love Songs (Hyperion), the pianist Angela Hewitt quotes Hector Berlioz. Debating the relative powers of love and music, he concludes: “Love can give no idea of music: music can give an idea of love… Why separate one from the other.

For Olivier Messiaen, Sundays were sacrosanct. For more than six decades he was organist of Sainte-Trinité in Paris, having first deputised there as a 20-year-old in 1929. Remarkably, that same year also saw the appearance of his first published compositions, the eight Préludes for piano, so it seemed fitting that six of these were central to Angela Hewitt’s Sunday morning recital at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama.

There's a new superstar pianist on the horizon: Behzod Abduraimov. Haven't heard of him yet? That's not surprising — at just 21, this native of Tashkent, Uzbekistan has kept a very low profile so far. He's spent the past five years in the U.S., but not at a big-name school like the Curtis Institute (like Lang Lang or Yuja Wang, for example) or at Juilliard, where he was accepted as a student. Instead, he went to study with Stanislav Ioudenitch Park University in Salt Lake City Parkville, Missouri, where he's still enrolled.

“I think with Bach it's much easier to practice for many hours than with some other composers,“ said Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov, who has always wanted to spend more time with Bach. “It’s so harmonious and everything makes sense, even the most complex polyphony still makes sense.”

On his new recording, Bach: The Art of Life, Trifonov explores the scientific, emotional and spiritual dimensions of the composer. The album is centered around Bach’s late mystical masterpiece, The Art of Fugue.

One of the first major classical concerts to fall victim to COVID-19 back in March 2020 was a recital by the pianist Daniil Trifonov featuring Bach’s “The Art of Fugue.” Trifonov, at the time, was known chiefly for his seemingly effortless performances of demanding virtuoso repertoire, so it was tantalizing to wonder what he would make of Bach’s last, unfinished work, which carries an air of mystery and exists halfway between a piece to be performed and a treatise on counterpoint.

Instrumental music intrinsically has an earnestness that probably comes from its wordless-yet-plainspoken musicality. And the music of strings produces just such an endearing blend between the manmade and the organic — a naturally occurring material is held taut between two points which, when struck with intent, produces vibrations that can “heal this world through spiritual nourishment,” as Ustad Amjad Ali Khan puts it.

A collaboration that’s about a decade in the making, classical guitar artist Sharon Isbin joined forces with sarod maestro Ustad Amjad Ali Khan and his sons, Amaan Ali Bangash and Ayaan Ali Bangash, for the album Strings for Peace, released on May 22nd via ZOHO.