The KPAC Blog features classical music news and analysis. From a detailed look at Wagner's masterpiece"Parsifal," to an inside look at the Latin Grammys, the KPAC Blog features writings about some of the music played on air as well as other interviews and essays about classical music.
Originally published on Fri February 7, 2014 8:24 am
In 2006, at the 78th Academy Awards, the film Brokeback Mountain captured three Oscars and the attention of movie fans everywhere. That two handsome stars — Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal — played the lead roles helped propel the film's popularity.
But the tale of star-crossed sheepherders who fall in love on a rugged Wyoming mountain originated long before the film, as a tightly focused short story by Annie Proulx that was published in the New Yorker in 1997.
Police in Milwaukee have recovered "Lipinski" – a 300-year-old Stradivarius stolen last month from a concertmaster as he was walking to his car with the rare violin.
The last weekend of the San Antonio Symphony's Dvořák Festival is coming, but to begin we look back at last weekend’s "Rusalka."
“I was really proud and really happy with the result, and I think our understanding of Dvořák really changed with this piece," said symphony Music Director Lang-Lessing. "We really learned about Dvořák.”
Headlining this weekend are Dvořák’s Fifth and Ninth Symphonies, but as Lang-Lessing explained, before playing them the symphony tackles a contemporary piece by American Jennifer Higdon.
Guitar fans and music lovers, there’s a program this Sunday you’ll want to know about. On Sunday, February 9, the UTSA Recital Hall hosts the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet.
The Quartet has been together for 33 years and have accumulated multiple awards, including a Grammy. The music they play runs the gamut from bluegrass to Bach to jazz, according to UTSA Music Professor and guitarist, Matt Dunne.
Karen Marie Richardson (right) plays the title role in the Long Beach Opera's staging of <em>Queenie Pie</em>, the jazz opera Duke Ellington left unfinished when he died in 1974.
Duke Ellington added more than 3,000 songs to the American music vault before his death in 1974. He also started composing what he hoped would be a great American street opera — which composers have spent 40 years adapting, trying to figure out what the Duke wanted for his unfinished opus.
But before you imagine soothing arias or boisterous trills and vibrato, let me stop you: Ellington's opera is very much a work of jazz.
Mieczyslaw Weinberg's opera <em>The Passenger</em> tells the story of an Auschwitz prisoner and a Nazi guard, whose lives continue to interweave after the the war. <em> </em>
Credit Lynn Lane / Houston Grand Opera
The action in <em>The Passenger</em> begins on the deck of a cruise ship, then ventures below deck as the characters' memories of the Holocaust surface.
Composer Dmitri Shostakovich called it a perfect masterpiece without ever having seen it performed. The Passenger, an opera about the Holocaust, was written nearly half a century ago, but was only given its first full performance just three years ago.
Now it's getting its U.S. premiere at the Houston Grand Opera. The opera is based on a story by a Holocaust survivor, with music by Mieczyslaw Weinberg, a composer who lost his entire family in the Nazi death camps.
Who knows who'll win the Super Bowl tomorrow, but history will be made before the coin toss.
Renee Fleming will sing the national anthem at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. She is the first opera star to be asked, and it seems so utterly fitting, both for the first Super Bowl to be played within view of the towers of New York, and in the 200th anniversary year of the national anthem.
A ballet classic is opening soon, and Ballet San Antonio is presenting it. If you don’t know the story behind Igor Stravinsky’s "The Firebird," Ballet San Antonio President and CEO Courtney Barker explains its premise, starting with Prince Ivan.
“He goes on a journey to seek and win the heart of a princess," she said. "On his journey he meets a glowing, magical bird that protects him through the journey. And we have monsters that come out, and those are played by ten of our male dancers.”
In 2005, the film Brokeback Mountain broke ground as a major motion picture portraying a love story about two men: a pair of young cowboys, Ennis and Jack, in the 1960s.
They fall in love during a summer spent tending sheep in the isolation of a fictional mountain in Wyoming. They spend the rest of the film — and their lives — grappling with a love that they have to keep secret.
