David Patrick Stearns

The New York City artist community was hit hard by Hurricane Sandy, which destroyed many works by current painters and sculptors. When the performance artist and composer Laurie Anderson peered into her basement, she saw her personal archive - decades of papers, prop,s and important artistic keepsakes  - floating.

So Anderson decided, as The Philadelphia Inquirer's David Patrick Stearns now reports, to create a piece about it with the Kronos Quartet titled Landfall.

The 2013 Philadelphia Jewish Music Festival concluded with a curious 1918 silent film, The Yellow Ticket, presented at the Gershman Y in Center City, with live musical accompaniment that gave the often-grainy images a new life and renewed meaning. One of the first films about anti-Semitism, The Yellow Ticket reminded The Philadelphia Inquirer's David Patrick Stearns just how much the world has changed – and how much it has yet to change.

If the classical recording market is supposedly global, why is a major Yannick Nezet-Seguin recording available seemingly everywhere but here? The Philadelphia Inquirer’s David Patrick Stearns sent away to Japan for the conductor’s new Rotterdam Philharmonic recording - and wonders why.

Once ignored by conservatories and reviled by audiences, Schoenberg’s half-spoken, half-sung Pierrot Lunaire is being intensively rehearsed for performances by Curtis Institute of Music musicians on Monday and Tuesday of next week (April 15th and 16th).

As The Philadelphia Inquirer’s David Patrick Stearns reports, the instigators are visiting professors who don’t look much different from the students: the modern music ensemble eighth blackbird, who are in the first year of a three-year residency that should extend the Curtis tradition to the cutting edge.

“Great and Mighty Things” are being seen at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. That’s the title of a highly unorthodox exhibition of self-taught or outsider art: works by people unschooled, unfiltered, and unmediated by outside aesthetics, but created out of a pure inner need.

But don't think that outsider artists are confined to the idiosyncratic paintings, drawings and sculptures that  can be seen at the museum through June. The Philadelphia Inquirer's David Patrick Stearns hears outsider composers everywhere, even in the insider realms of Princeton University.

This month, WRTI is showcasing the works of various women composers. WRTI's Meridee Duddleston looks at a Philadelphia favorite: Jennifer Higdon.

Philadelphia’s Jennifer Higdon is among the most frequently performed living American composers. Now 50, the successful, unpretentious, and endlessly creative Higdon is adding an opera to her extensive repertoire. It’s a joint commission of The Santa Fe Opera and Opera Philadelphia based on Charles Frazier’s Civil War novel Cold Mountain. Higdon’s family moved from Atlanta to east Tennessee when she was an adolescent– about 40 miles, she says, as the crow flies from Cold Mountain. That geographic proximity fueled her insight into the characters she’s recasting in operatic form.

Higdon’s partner, Cheryl Lawson, runs Lawdon Press, the company that publishes and distributes Higdon’s works.  Among her most-performed compositions is blue cathedral, a tone poem she wrote after the death, from cancer, of her brother Andrew Blue Higdon. Her works have been recorded on dozens of CDs and performed around the world.  

Pianist Van Cliburn's international fame landed him on the popular '50s and '60s television quiz show What's My Line? as a mystery guest - not a typical scenario for most classical artists.

In the wake of his death from cancer on Feb. 27th, the music world is reminded anew that winning the Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958 did him a world of good as well as a world of harm. Yet he wasn't the only one. The Philadelphia Inquirer's David Patrick Stearns looks at the somewhat lost generation that was Cliburn's pianistic contemporaries, including Leon Fleisher, Gary Graffman, and Byron Janis.

Classical pianists just keep getting younger, and some are playing major engagements with The Philadelphia Orchestra before they're old enough to even take a legal drink.

These new young Turks are different from those of old, says The Philadelphia Inquirer’s David Patrick Stearns, because they’re making their names more from their brains and hearts rather than just their fingers.

His name is Yannick Nezet-Seguin, but in a New York Times profile recently, he was nicknamed "Mighty Mouse" by the opera star Joyce DiDonato.

After all, he's been saving the day for the recently distressed Philadelphia Orchestra. And, as The Philadelphia Inquirer's David Patrick Stearns reports, he hopes to continue to do so in the upcoming 2013-2014 season.