Although an original cast video of As One is not available—the excerpt below is from the 2014 premiere at Brooklyn Academy of Music—an original cast audio recording was released on June 28, 2019. For the project, from the Bright Shiny Things label, the opera’s original cast of two singers, the wife-husband team of mezzo-soprano Sasha…
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What’s the most frequently performed new opera in America at present? It’s Laura Kaminsky’s 2014 chamber opera, As One, whose libretto by Mark Campbell and Kimberly Reed explores the coming out process of its protagonist, Hannah, as a transgender woman.
As I wrote before in these pages, I have long been acquainted with French electronics manufacturer Trinnov. Years ago, at an Audio Engineering Society convention in New York, a Trinnov rep used a mastering console equipped with their processor to move, at will, the sounds of instruments around the 3D soundstage and left me thoroughly impressed. That was before my conversion from stereo to multichannel music listening, and before the blurring of borders between home theater and mainstream audio.
Subsequently, I reported on an AVR with a simplified version of Trinnov processing, and later…
I began with my longtime reference, Willie Nelson's Night and Day (DVD-A, Surrounded By Entertainment SBE1001-9, DVD-A). After all this time, I thought I had the measure of this recording. I was wrong. Compared with the sound of this disc without the Trinnov Altitude 32, the placement of each instrument shifted subtly: The rear-channel sources were no longer elevated as they had been before. And each instrument now had a discrete image, one that was not associated with the physical position of any of the speakers. The performers and the ambience of the conjured space were solidly correlated…
Sidebar: Contacts
Trinnov, 5 rue Edmond Michelet, 93360 Neuilly-Plaisance, France. Tel: (33) 147 066137. Trinnov USA, 201 West High Street, East Hampton, CT 06424. Web: www.trinnov.com.
Essence Electrostatic, Saint Petersburg, FL 33701. Tel: (727) 580-4393. Web: www.essenceelectrostatic.com.
American composer John Adams and I first met in the late 1970s, when I became one of his composition students at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. My recollections from those days endure as near-cinematic images: John lugging his homemade synthesizer—he called it "the Studebaker"—down the hall prior to meeting me at his office; an early performance, at Mills College in Oakland, of Adams's Shaker Loops (footnote 1) for string septet; sitting with Adams during rehearsals for the 1981 premiere of his choral symphony Harmonium (footnote 2), with Edo De Waart and the San Francisco Symphony…
Matson: Going forward, for the recorded catalog of classical music old and new, in terms of compensation, in regards to streaming and so forth: Can this work, or are we done?
Adams: I talk a lot about this with my friend [Nonesuch Records President Emeritus] Bob Hurwitz. If it's an opera, you want the wonderful essays, and the libretto. There's also the aspect of just having an object, if you really care about an album. You go to Amazon now, and they sometimes don't even list the composer, because the whole thing's been done by an algorithm.
Matson: You once described opera as…
Thursday July 11th from 4-9pm, Command Performance AV, located at 115 Park Avenue, Suite #2, in Falls Church, Virginia, is hosting an event featuring new products from DS Audio and Nordost. Jon Baker of Musical Surroundings will demonstrate optical cartridge systems from DS Audio, including the new “entry-level” DS-E1 and the top-of-the-line DS Master1. Steve Greene from Nordost will demonstrate Nordost’s amazing QRT power products, including the premier of the QPOINT Resonance Synchronizer and
Thursday, July 18th from 4 - 7 PM at our showroom located at 647 Francisco Blvd. E., AVI Marin of San Rafael, California, will hold an intimate listening event with Dan D’Agostino’s Relentless monoblock amplifiers. The Relentless will be paired with Wilson Alexx speakers via Nordost Odin Supreme Reference speaker cables. Top representatives from D'Agostino will provide a demonstration of one of the most incredible and powerful amplifiers on the planet. Come enjoy fantastic music, delicious food, and adult beverages. Seating is limited, so we encourage interested parties to RSVP now to secure…
Back when the vinyl resurgence was only a gleam in Michael Fremer's eye, most major record labels just couldn't be bothered with the LP. Fans of such masterpieces as Relaxin' with the Miles Davis Quintet, John Coltrane's Blue Train, and Charles Mingus's Blues & Roots had to make do with poor-quality vinyl reissues from small EU-based labels. Sure, there were—and continue to be—audiophile-quality reissues from such companies as Analogue Productions and Speakers Corner, but they often came at a premium price, and a great many classic jazz titles remained unavailable as new, high-quality…
Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to spend a couple of afternoons listening to a system built around the late David Wilson's magnum opus, the Wilson Audio WAMM Master Chronosonic loudspeaker ($685,000/pair), which Jason Victor Serinus reported on in December 2016. In addition to the joy of simply listening to music on such exotic speakers, the experience provided insight into just how well the Master Chronosonics would work in a relatively normal-sized listening room—in this case, one measuring 21.5 feet long by a little over 18 feet wide, with a ceiling height of a little over 9.5…