Miscellany

The viol consort Sonnambula is set to explore the music of the seventeenth-century Flemish composer Leonora Duarte, who came from a distinguished family of converted Portuguese Jews. Sonnambula is recording her seven Sinfonias, and on Feb. 13 they will give an allied concert at the Church of St. Ignatius of Antioch in NYC.... The gifted young composer Ashley Fure, an agile manipulator of instrumental, electronic, and environmental sounds, will be the subject of a Portrait Concert at Miller Theatre tomorrow night, Feb. 4. David Allen recently profiled her in the New York Times. ICE will present Fure's opera The Force of Things in Darmstadt on Aug. 1, with a preview in NYC preceding. A trailer provides tantalizing glimpses.... When the Minnesota Orchestra had its near-extinction lockout crisis a few years ago, a Sibelius series in progress fell by the wayside. No earthly power can stop Osmo Vänskä from conducting Sibelius; he and the orchestra will return to the field in coming weeks, first revisiting the Kullervo Symphony on Feb. 4-6 — their 2010 performance sent me into a fit of superlatives — and then reviving the "lost program," of the First and Third symphonies, first in Minneapolis Feb. 18-20 and then at Carnegie Hall on March 3.  .... On Friday night in Boston, the Sound Icon series will explore the eerie, crystalline music of Hans Abrahamsen, performing his Winternacht and Schnee. The composer will be on hand for an interview. More soon on the subject of Abrahamsen's vocal-orchestral work let me tell you, a superb recording of which is now available from the Winter & Winter label, with Barbara Hannigan singing and Andris Nelsons conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony.... The polymathic New York Times critic Ben Ratliff has a fascinating new book called Every Song Ever, in which he organizes a huge variety of music not by genre but by texture or gesture (slow, fast, dense, repetitive, etc.). On Feb. 8 I will talk to Ben at Skylight Books in Los Angeles, one of the country's finest independent bookstores.