What recordings do you buy and why? What recordings have you listened to recently? Laura Kuhn, Director, John Cage Trust
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NewMusicBox is terrific, but I confess that what I’m listening to right now doesn’t really qualify as new American music: both CDs available of Dulce Pontes, entitled Caminhos and Lagrimas, and both extraordinarily beautiful. American audiences may only be familiar with her work from the film “Primal Fear” (Ed Norton, Richard Gere, et al.), where one cut was featured. She recently is also featured on one cut on a CD with Andrea Bocelli, one of the many current darlings of the opera world, but it’s too much Bocelli and not enough Pontes. She’s a long-standing and very much revered artist in Lisbon, and for good reason. Both CDs are available but not easy to find: Eur/Portugal #850101 for “Caminhos” and Eur/Portugal #3003 for “Lagrimas.”
I’m also listening to Mikel Rouse‘s yet unreleased American Dream, the materials for which (eight or so “retro-songs”) form the basis of his in-progress opera (the third in the trilogy) The End of Cinematics (which, coincidentally, is up in a workshop version at St. Anne’s this weekend). Really, really, really wonderful work.