On Thursday (5/19) at New York classical radio station WQXR, Amanda Angel writes about the Tippet Rise Art Center in Montana, which “will be inaugurated on June 17, with a six-week music festival, overseen by the pianist Christopher O’Riley. [Alban] Bassuet … is the facility’s executive director…. The music festival is just one aspect of this center, which is developing a sculpture park … and a working ranch with around 500 cows…. The first season … lasts through July 23, with an additional weekend in August. The main indoor venue is the unassuming Olivier Barn, which doubles as a 200-seat acoustically optimized concert hall and recording space, as well as the outdoor Tiara Acoustical Shell that provides a canopy for performers without obstructing the audience’s view of the landscape…. ‘Scriabin had this megalomaniacal sense of being a composer of music to be played on mountain tops, so here we are playing concerts in the outdoors with the Beartooths surrounding us,’ [O’Riley] explained. Other programs involve Olivier Messiaen, who spent much of his life composing music near Grenoble looking at the French Alps, and John Luther Adams’s Inuksuit, written for a large group of percussionists and intended to be performed outdoors.”
Posted May 23, 2016
