Miscellany

George Benjamin will take over the Mostly Mozart Festival next week, as Written on Skin, an honest-to-God twenty-first-century operatic masterpiece (my 2013 review is here), receives three performances at the venue formerly known as the New York State Theater. Alan Gilbert conducts. On Aug. 16, Benjamin himself will lead ICE in a program of Messiaen's Oiseaux exotiques, Ligeti's Piano Concerto, and his own Into the Little Hill. Pierre-Laurent Aimard is the piano soloist at the latter concert.... On Sedge Clark's blog, Victoria Bond gives an insider's perspective on Musikfabrik's recent performances of Harry Partch's Delusion of the Fury: she was the Old Goat Woman in the original 1969 production.... At the site Hyperallegric, Alison Kinney has a superb piece on African-American opera singers and the Met's belated decision to abandon blackface.... I'm proud to be a mere footnote in Kyle Gann's soon-to-be-canonical study of the Ives Concord Sonata....