Capital New York

This afternoon at BAM, City Opera and Rufus Wainwright need a hit; will they get it?

Fittingly, Prima Donna is an opera about the opera. What better way for Wainwright to address his feelings towards the genre, and for Steel to communicate his vision of the place of City Opera, than by staging a work set around the failings of an aging diva who is losing her voice? More

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By Colin Leonard

SirenFest grows up and moves to Manhattan, for better, worse or neither

The dock does not feel like a dock, it just happens to be made of wood; the whole environment seems contrived for tourists and class trips rather than a raucous showcase for challenging, loud, difficult, erudite new music. At first, the crowd seemed, to me, to be reserving its judgment on the event, called 4Knots, in its first year under that name and at South Street Seaport. More

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By Colin Leonard

A math-rock supergroup loses its voice, and gets some soul

Back in August, more than three years after the release of their first full-length album, Mirrored, the band known as Battles issued a terse statement saying that lead singer Tyondai Braxton was leaving the band to pursue his own projects, and the mythmaking band found itself operating on a different storyline: Music blogs and forums were speculating whether the band could continue without him.

Today, Battles released its hotly anticipated sophomore effort, Gloss Drop, and lead guitarist Williams says he's pleased with the results. More

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By Colin Leonard

Dan Deacon: A Pied Piper of pop becomes a classical Prince Hal

In early February, Deacon will premier his first symphony at the Konrad Centre for the Performing Arts in Ontario, Canada. Recently, he was asked to score the next Francis Ford Coppola film, Twixt Now and Sunrise. And on Thursday night, he's joining Brooklyn's well-respected classical percussion ensemble, Sō Percussion, at Merkin Concert Hall to help ring in the Ecstatic Music Festival there. The piece he will be playing at Merkin Hall is called "Ghostbuster Cook: The Origin of the Riddler."

“I feel like I’m finally turning the faucets a little more so that more music, ideas, and output can come out that aren’t so similar," Deacon said in a telephone interview with Capital. "And I feel like it’ll help my pop music stand out a lot more.” More

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By Colin Leonard