Queens of the Stone Age / Nine Inch Nails Tour in Australia!

I've got tickets!

OK, they're in Newcastle.. but they're GA standing! And it's well worth a roadtrip to Newy to see these 2 acts. To fire us all up and direct the NIN / QOTSA noobs I've made a playlist based on these band's most recent setlists. Make sure you share it around, it's a keeper.


 

Aspen Music Festival Embarks on New Era

ASPEN, Colo. - Give the Aspen Music Festival and School full points for resilience. In 2010 the institution was just emerging from several years of turmoil. Alan Fletcher, its president and chief executive (and a composer represented in this season's programming), had been fired and rehired amid faculty uprisings and administrative disputes. Its board chairman had been voted out. The conductor David Zinman, its music director and a founder of its American Academy of Conducting, had left in a serious huff.

Today, insofar as an outsider could quickly determine over the weekend, peace seems to reign.

And as a potent symbol of the dawning of a new era, the school this year unveiled a campus wildly transformed. Two ramshackle sheds used for rehearsals and teaching have been replaced on more or less the same footprints by gleaming, handsome and acoustically correct buildings. Sixty-eight practice rooms have been added.

Another new building, with studios for private instruction, is in the final stages of construction. And more is to come: an orchestral rehearsal hall and an administration building with a cafeteria.

The phase of construction already completed, the first of three, represents about 60 percent of a $65 million project to be completed in 2016, carried out in partnership with the Aspen Country Day School. The school, which occupies the campus during the academic year, is shouldering $30 million of the cost.

Though changes were made with sensitivity to the natural surroundings - like the stylized mountain designs on the building facades and the installation of a small island refuge in one of the ponds to keep coyotes and foxes from feasting on ducks - there is no question that some of the campus's rustic charm and sense of roughing it is being lost. (Face it: Not that much of the pioneering spirit survives in the rest of ultrachic Aspen, either.) But it is hard to gainsay the musical and educational values advanced by the project.

Also representing the new era is the conductor Robert Spano, who became music director of the festival and school and director of the conducting academy last year. Mr. Spano, a dynamic force well remembered by New Yorkers from his days leading the Brooklyn Philharmonic, is also the music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.

The festival theme this summer is "Conscience and Beauty," though that was less a template in the making of programs, Mr. Spano said in an interview, than a lens through which to view them.

This year's programming also offers 25 works by Benjamin Britten in honor of his centenary.

The centerpiece of the season came on Saturday evening: a superb semi-staged version of Britten's great opera "Peter Grimes" in the music tent, with the Aspen Festival Orchestra and the Colorado Symphony Orchestra Chorus, conducted by Mr. Spano. The powerful production, by Edward Berkeley, the director of the Aspen Opera Theater Center, fell little short of an actual staging in its conception and impact.

A large fishing net hanging over the stage and a few salty props economically evoked the seaside. The characters (except the chorus, representing the townsfolk) wore costumes by Toni Wright, and the lighting, by Kevin Kirkpatrick, proved effective right down to the lightning effects, which seemed for all the world to be coming from outside the tent on that rainy night.

The large cast was admirable across the board. The burly tenor Anthony Dean Griffey seemed actually to be Grimes: a slightly addled fisherman in a gossipy village suspected of murdering one young apprentice and then another, who sees too much in his visions and comprehends too little of reality.

Also particularly moving were the soprano Susanna Phillips as the widowed schoolteacher, Ellen, and the baritone Brian Mulligan as the old sea captain, Balstrode, among the few who show a modicum of compassion for Grimes. The rich-toned contralto Meredith Arwady created a sympathetic character and provided most of the work's slender comic relief as Auntie, the publican and madam.

The orchestra, mingling professional principal players with students, was excellent. The chorus, well trained by its director, Duain Wolfe, was also impressive.

Mr. Spano conducted with a sure hand, luxuriating in the orchestral sea interludes, pacing the work cannily, imparting energy and sustaining the drama throughout.

Britten appeared in two other weekend programs in the tent. On Friday evening Tomas Netopil conducted the Aspen Chamber Symphony, another mix of professionals and students, in "Young Apollo," an engaging early work for piano and strings, which Britten quickly withdrew but which turned up after his death. Lise de la Salle played the exuberant piano flourishes with flair and was also the fine soloist in Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 in A.

Mahler's Fourth Symphony, which completed the program, suffered from imbalances, including French horns that blared almost throughout, and from an apparent miscasting. Sasha Cooke sang the song of the finale beautifully, but the weight of her mezzo-soprano voice in a part written for soprano pulled the ethereal arcs of melody referring to "heavenly life" earthward.

On Sunday afternoon Hugh Wolff conducted the all-student Aspen Philharmonic Orchestra in Britten's Cello Symphony (Op. 68), a work that can sound murky at times, and did here. The cello soloist was David Finckel, who recently left the Emerson String Quartet and - with his wife, the pianist Wu Han - established an annual chamber music program at the school this summer. Mr. Finckel got around the notes well enough but would have benefited from a bigger sound in a work written for the powerhouse Mstislav Rostropovich.

Mr. Wolff and his young charges closed the concert with a bang-up performance of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 6. The Presto finale, with the young players reveling in the thrill of collective virtuosity, was sheer joy.

On Saturday morning the festival presented one of its always entertaining opera-scenes master classes in the historic Wheeler Opera House, featuring talented young singers from the opera theater and conductors from the academy. The British early-music specialist Nicholas McGegan, who presided over the class with Mr. Berkeley, the director, trod dangerous ground when he noted that Blöndchen, in Mozart's "Entführung aus dem Serail" ("Abduction From the Seraglio"), "like a good English lady, won't stop talking."

He was on firmer footing in praising the gorgeous Wheeler as an ideal house for Mozart. "Enjoy it," he told a quartet of students, assuring them that even the quietest pianissimos would register. "It will never get better than this in terms of a space to play."

Also heard, on Thursday evening, was a piano recital in the Harris Concert Hall by Anton Nel, a favorite of the festival. More on that another day.

The Aspen Music Festival runs through Aug. 18 in Colorado; (970) 925-9042, aspenmusicfestival.com.

London contemporary music festival: a new twist on a classical concept

Contemporary classical music in Britain has always been pushed to the physical and cultural peripheries. In Elgar's day the focal point was the Three Choirs festival in the west of England. By the mid-century Benjamin Britten had moved the action to Suffolk. From the 1980s it had shifted again to Huddersfield.

This weekend, though, sees the start of the first ever London contemporary music festival (LCMF 2013), of which I'm a co-director and curator. It's an attempt, beginning last night, to return new classical music to the capital.

Over the course of two long weekends (25-28 July and 1-4 August), Peckham car park will resound to the drones of Tony Conrad and Charlemagne Palestine, the gnashing electric guitar epics of Glenn Branca, the stuttering beats of SND and the experimental modernism of Helmut Lachenmann. There'll be new harpsichord solos, eight-channel electronics, a trombone quartet, music for massed trumpets, opera world premieres and we'll be smashing up a piano.

There's been a lot of talk recently about contemporary music and its problems - yet it's hard to see what these are from where we're standing. All but a tiny percentage of our 5,000 free tickets went in the first four days of booking. If there is a problem with new music, it's not in the lack of an audience, or in the difficulty of the music. I think it's in the prevailing paradigm of concert programming - in its dry, miserly narratives, its identikit presentations, its uninviting spaces.

For LCMF 2013, pioneers from the worlds of sound art (Laurie Anderson), noise (Russell Haswell), American experimentalism (Frederic Rzewski), acousmatics (Bernard Parmegiani) and free improv (Steve Noble) will come together. Next to these outsiders we've put the academic giants Ligeti, Kurtág and Xenakis. Both sets are crucial to the narrative - each informs the other. Yet few established ensembles can tell this polyphonic story because bureaucracy prevents them: the financial impetus is to conserve and not experiment.

Few of these constraints are to be found in the visual arts, which have moved into the experimental vacuum vacated by contemporary music with a rapacious energy. It's no accident that galleries and university art departments played the midwife to minimalism's first experiments while its composers were forced to find refuge from the classical establishment. To capitalise on this, we've teamed up with Bold Tendencies, the arts commissioning agency behind the sculpture festival and series of public programmes at Peckham car park.

The freedom of a space such as Bold Tendencies and the curiosity of its audience is crucial. Each previous power base of new music spoke to the era it represented: cathedrals for the spiritual patriots of Three Choirs; tarted-up barns for the post-pastoralists at Aldeburgh; converted warehouses for the neomodernists at Huddersfield. So it is with LCMF 2013. It makes profound sense - artistically, acoustically and socially - to make use of such a generous space, in which one can roam and explore and not merely sit and stare.

The music at LCMF 2013 is uncompromisingly contemporary - half of the compositions will be premieres or works written since 2000 - but it is the setting and the programme that will be truly be of our time.

* The London contemporary music festival runs until 4 August.

Prince Harry and Cressida Bonas Attend Womad Music Festival—See the Pics

Summer love!

Prince Harry and his girlfriend Cressida Bonas were spotted at yet another music festival over the weekend-this time at Womad in Wiltshire, England.

The 28-year-old prince and the blond beauty joined a bevy of their friend as they listened to artists like Ed Harcourt and Arrested Development.

And not even the rain could dampen their moods, the royal covered up with a hat (the same one he wore to Glastonbury a few weeks ago!) and coat while his gal pal brought a bright blue umbrella to tie her over for the occasion.

NEWS: All the details on Harry and Cressida's time at Glastonbury

This doesn't mark the first time that the two have made an appearance at Womad. Last year, both Harry and Cressida stopped by to watch their favorite bands play and experienced slightly better weather. This is England, after all.

It looks like music festivals are all the rage this summer as well for the young couple. The two were seen partying in the audience at Glastonbury in June as well.

The redheaded royal joined his girlfriend to take in a performance by the Rolling Stones on the second day of the three-day-long event.

"Prince Harry was great, actually," festival organizer Michael Eavis told The Telegraph. "I recommended that he should go on into the night, because the nightlife is what Glastonbury is all about."

NEWS: Everything you need to know about Cressida Bonas!

Jesal / Tanna / Splash News

And Harry apparently heeded the suggestion.

"I told him to get his taxi driver to come back at five o'clock in the morning and do you know what? He lasted until four in the morning," Eavis added.

Since becoming an item, the two have been seen getting cozy after the Dark Knight Rises premiere and partying together at a club in London.

Earlier this year, Harry and Cressida displayed a bit of PDA during a ski holiday in Verbier, Switzerland. While the royal vacay also included Harry's uncle Prince Andrew and his ex, Sarah Ferguson, and cousins Beatrice and Eugenie, all eyes were clearly on the pretty pair.

PHOTOS: Check out these pics of Harry, royal and rugged!