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David Lang’s music featured in new film by Oscar-winning director Paolo Sorrentino

David Lang’s music is featured in the upcoming film, Youth, by Italian director Paolo Sorrentino — 2014 Oscar-winner for best foreign film (The Great Beauty). David scored the new film (about a contemporary composer), and one of his recent pieces ‘just (after song of songs)’ is the music for the official trailer! It was commissioned, premiered and released by the Louth Contemporary Music Society and is performed by vocalists Trio Mediaeval and Garth Knox’s Salterro Trio…

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‘the difficulty of crossing a field’ at Nashville Opera

November 9-11, The Nashville Opera presents David Lang’s chamber opera the difficulty of crossing a field.

With this work, Lang and multi-Obie award-winning playwright Mac Wellman have created a radical cross between opera and theater mixing arias with spoken text, emotional melodies with intense drama, and featuring a string quartet as both the ‘orchestra’ and as part of the staging.

Based on a one-page short story by American satirist and abolitionist author,

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‘the loser’ New York Times review

click to read the NYT review

“…the score is a model of how music can animate words. The text is set with impressive clarity, and Mr. Gilfry sings every phrase with crisp diction and dramatic point, delivering phrases with virile energy, sudden bluster, or, during vulnerable moments, an aching confusion that takes you by surprise.”
— Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times

writing

Donald Martin Jenni (1937-2006): A Remembrance

July 28, 2006

Two weeks ago I received a sad email, telling me that the composer Donald Martin Jenni had died, from a long and painful cancer. My first thought was that I was sorry I had not kept in closer contact, my second was that I was surprised to read in his obituary that he had ended up in New Orleans, with a new life and an adopted family. His life had changed so much since I had known him. I had been a masters student of Martin's from 1978 to 1980 at the University of Iowa, and although we had stayed in touch after I left Iowa—we would send each other music and he would come visit whenever he was in New York—the second that he retired he vanished…

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NPR Music’s 25 Favorite Albums Of The Year (So Far)

NPR Music announced their 25 Favorite Albums of the Year (so far)… and David Lang’s ‘death speaks’ is on their list!

Here’s what they have to say about it:

You probably wouldn’t expect The National‘s Bryce Dessner and My Brightest Diamond‘s Shara Worden to work on a classically focused project inspired by Franz Schubert, but that’s exactly what happens within composer David Lang‘s amazing Death Speaks, which also features Nico Muhly playing piano and Owen Pallett on violin…

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