George Tsontakis has received two of the richest prizes awarded in all of classical music - the international Grawemeyer Award, in 2005, for his Second Violin Concerto, and the 2007 Charles Ives Living award, given every three years by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Ryan Morris writes of Tsontakis' Violin Concerto No. 2 (2003), "This is an extraordinary violin concerto. The more you listen to it, the more you will enjoy it and the more it will call to you with its strange glasslike textures and rolling rhythms. There is much lyricism here, as can be heard in the first movement and the "cantilena" - the heart - of the concerto; it's one of the finest pieces Tsontakis has composed." See a performance of the Violin Concerto No. 2 with violinist Paul Kantor and the Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra conducted by Michael Adelson . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

Hikurangi Sunrise was composed by Christopher Marshall for the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra in 1999 as the result of a quest by the orchestra and ConcertFM Radio to find a piece to mark the turn of the millennium. In 2000, after several performances throughout New Zealand it was judged overwhelmingly the audience's favorite work. According to the composer, "Hikurangi Sunrise, is a festive overture expressing my feelings for Aotearoa-New Zealand. Hikurangi is the sacred mountain on East Cape in the North Island of New Zealand. It is the first place in the world to see the sun. I imagined myself standing on the summit as the sun rose, with a bird's-eye view of the beach, forests and farmlands below. The music is strongly melodic throughout, with an unmistakably Romantic flavor and not without the occasional, slightly ironic nod in the direction of the nationalistic overtures of past ages." Listen to a performance of Hikurangi Sunrise by New Zealand Symphony Orchestra with James Judd conducting . . . our current PYTHEAS EARFUL.

Christopher Lydon at Open Source writes, "My subtitle for Alex Ross's addictive encyclopedia The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century would be: How the headquarters of musical composition moved from Vienna to Los Angeles: from the old home address of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms to its new home in and around Hollywood: home, that is, of the refugee modernists Stravinsky and Schoenberg and of course the movie business and the film score: name your monument from Bernard Herrmann's themes for Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941) and the great Hitchcocks, to Tan Dun's for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)." Read more and listen to an interview with Alex Ross about contemporary music . . . it's this week's FEATURED THOUGHT & IDEA.

According to composer Alex Shapiro, " I named my 2004 composition Bioplasm because 'Oozing Up From the Primordial Sludge' seemed a bit long for a title. Bioplasm is the stuff of life, the germinal matter that's essential for living beings to generate. This is a squishy piece: rather than exploit the individual voice of each flute, I wanted to create an organism that oozes across the sonic floor as one tethered entity, sometimes slowly, sometimes at a quick pace, but always as one, like a Slinky toy. The blend of homogenous sound with four flutes is a throbbing pulse of life; add to this four human voices, and it's a choir of plasma, looking for life to begin." Hear Alex Shapiro's Bioplasm, accompanied by artist Simon Kenevan creating a pastel study for After a Storm . . . this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.

Explore, Listen and Enjoy!
Vinny Fuerst
Pytheas Center for Contemporary Music