Insects in a Tarkovskian Landscape: The Manhattan Sinfonietta at Harvard

I just returned from a great concert at Paine Hall and my ears are still resounding with the fabulous music I heard a few hours ago.

The program was part of the Fromm Foundation Series that always forms the high point of the concert season at the Harvard Music Department for me. This year, Hans Tutschku, the curator of the series, invited the Manhattan Sinfonietta under Jeff Milarsky to perform two programs of contemporary music that couldn’t be more exciting.

Robert Helps Festival: Piano Extravaganza

The University of South Florida’s School of Music is in the midst of the fourth annual Robert Helps International Composition Competition and Festival. Each year, this event pays homage to Robert Helps (1928-2001), composer/pianist, who was a faculty member at USF and one of the key promoters of new music during the second half of the twentieth century. His music is best described as belonging to New Romanticism and he had a particular fondness for piano pieces. Each year there is a $10 000 prize awarded to the most promising composition by a young composer, as well as a performance of the winning work (this year’s winner was Lyudmila German, whose Piano Sonata No. 1 we heard played excellently by USF faculty member Svetozar Ivanov as the second half of tonight’s program).