The singers of Libera, who are aged seven to sixteen, attend many different local schools in South London and come from a variety of backgrounds. Although they are boys and they sing, they do not think of themselves as choirboys, but rather as an alternative kind of boy band. Their latest recording is Christmas Carols with Libera, and we can't imagine anything nicer for the holidays! Taking on the mellow and the more upbeat songs in this collection, the boys of Libera had great fun. The likes of ‘Ding Dong Merrily On High' require real precision, as well as purity. Many of the tracks were recorded during a group ‘retreat' to a rehearsal space in an old school, this allowed a true live feel to the process. The boy who took the lead vocal on ‘The Snowman' had just turned 9 years old, whilst the introductions to the French ‘Noël Nouvelet' and the Irish ‘Wexford Carol' are both handled by native French and Gaelic speakers, Libera is as polyglot as ever. Christmas Carols with Libera is the KUSC: Los Angeles 'Album Of the Week." SEE THE PAGE

The singers of Libera, who are aged seven to sixteen, attend many different local schools in South London and come from a variety of backgrounds. Although they are boys and they sing, they do not think of themselves as choirboys, but rather as an alternative kind of boy band. Their latest recording is Christmas Carols with Libera, and we can't imagine anything nicer for the holidays! Taking on the mellow and the more upbeat songs in this collection, the boys of Libera had great fun. The likes of ‘Ding Dong Merrily On High' require real precision, as well as purity. Many of the tracks were recorded during a group ‘retreat' to a rehearsal space in an old school, this allowed a true live feel to the process. The boy who took the lead vocal on ‘The Snowman' had just turned 9 years old, whilst the introductions to the French ‘Noël Nouvelet' and the Irish ‘Wexford Carol' are both handled by native French and Gaelic speakers, Libera is as polyglot as ever. Christmas Carols with Libera is the KDFC: San Francisco 'Album Of the Week.'     SEE THE PAGE p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #4d4d4d} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #4d4d4d; min-height: 14.0px}

The final opera in Philip Glass's "portrait" trilogy, Akhnaten, which premiered in 1984, had its Metropolitan debut this season. (The first two in the trilogy, Einstein on the Beach and Satyagraha, are about the lives of Albert Einstein and Mahatma Gandhi, respectively.) The score is minimalist with maximal effect, repetitive and slowly building on themes. The libretto is primarily in English, but also makes good use of Hebrew, ancient Egyptian, and Akkadian. The performance is intrinsically ritualistic. "If Einstein epitomized the man of Science and Gandhi the man of Politics, then Akhnaten would be the man of Religion," Glass once said of the work. Akhnaten's most affecting passion is not physical but spiritual. While the opera, as directed by Phelim McDermott, is bright and opulent, it makes clear that its protagonist is driven not by hedonism but by principle. Akhnaten is remarkable in its depiction of the Egyptian ruler's piety, its immemorial-sounding rhythms, and its visual composition of illumination and acrobatics. The opera has several different visual layers: relatively simple sets, careful lighting, and elaborate costumes and choreography. There is constant motion on stage, be it acrobats juggling, set pieces slowly moving, or lights varying in luster. The effect is entrancing. Although it's hardly an action-packed show, the glowing sun-like lights and acrobatics make it a visually arresting one. At his investiture as pharaoh in Act One, the first time that he appears on stage, Akhnaten, played by countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, arrives nude like a child being born. He does not dress but is dressed, a sign of royalty, and one which also reminds the audience that Akhnaten is fulfilling a duty by becoming pharaoh. He does not ascend because of personal desire for the throne but because of his obligation to his people and his gods that he has carried since birth. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #4d4d4d} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #4d4d4d; min-height: 14.0px} READ THE FULL NATIONAL REVIEW ARTICLE

My Top Ten this year covers the full range of new festive albums, starting with Old Bing. Decca has reissued Crosby's original vocals with new backing from the London Symphony Orchestra on Bing At Christmas.  A White Christmas has never seemed more enticing. On the anniversary of the untimely death of the world's first ‘multimedia' star Bing Crosby, October 14th sees his longtime record label, Decca, together with his widow Kathryn and their children, Harry, Mary, and Nathaniel Crosby, announce the release of the brand new album, Bing at Christmas, via Decca/UMe. Bing's is the voice that is completely synonymous with Christmas. Now, Bing's utterly distinctive original vocals are set to newly-recorded orchestral arrangements, performed by the UK's most prestigious orchestra, The London Symphony Orchestra, on an album that breathes new life into the best Christmas songs in existence.  The new album gives the world the chance to hear these beloved tracks totally transformed, with today's technical advances. Produced by Nick Patrick, who was behind the hugely successful Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, and Buddy Holly orchestral albums, Bing at Christmas boasts a unique sound and warmth that sets it apart from past Bing Crosby releases. SEE THE Mail Online PAGE p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #4d4d4d} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #4d4d4d; min-height: 14.0px}

When I think back on the musical events of the past decade, I think first of the sound of a composer talking. At the end of 2011, in the midst of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Philip Glass spoke to a crowd that had gathered on Lincoln Center Plaza. His opera "Satyagraha" had just been performed at the Met, and a crowd of protesters were registering the discrepancy between the opera's Gandhian ideals and modern economic reality. Glass, accepting their point, took hold of the human microphone and led a chant of one of the opera's Sanskrit texts: "When righteousness withers away and evil rules the land, we come into being, age after age, and take visible shape, and move, a man among men, for the protection of good, thrusting back evil and setting virtue on her seat again." When I wrote up the event for my end-of-year summary, I included a sentence from Virginia Woolf's "The Waves," one that has become a kind of mournful mantra: "One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour." Righteousness continues to wither away; evil is trending; a time or space outside the machine may no longer exist. Major classical-music institutions are generally too enmeshed in networks of power to make meaningful gestures of resistance. Orchestras and conservatories, no less than the National Basketball Association, stay silent on increasingly dire human-rights abuses in China. The Salzburg Festival is accepting money from Gazprom, a crucial component of Vladimir Putin's globally corrosive regime. Donald Trump has no interest in classical music, yet many of the plutocrats who support domestic performing-arts institutions welcome his policies. Still, I cling to the idea that music can play a constructively antagonistic role in a monopoly culture. The voices that matter most are those of living composers, who occupy a perennially uncomfortable position in an obsessively nostalgic classical ecosystem. They are, to adapt a phrase from Theodor W. Adorno, the splinter in the eye that becomes a magnifying glass. In any case, it has been a chaotically great decade for new music. The well-worn idea that twentieth-century avant-garde exhausted the possibilities of musical language is belied by the likes of Kate Soper's bravura philosophical monodrama "Ipsa Dixit," Chaya Czernowin's engulfing war requiem "Infinite Now," Liza Lim's fine-spun multicultural song cycle "Tongue of the Invisible," and Ashley Fure's molten soundscape "The Force of Things." It was also a decade in which veteran artists made statements of unstinting power: Meredith Monk's "On Behalf of Nature," a plea for a suffering planet; and Laurie Anderson's "Habeas Corpus," a monumental critique of the American torture regime. That these are all works of women is evidence of a long-awaited, though far from complete, revolution in a patriarchal profession. Although visceral experimentalism seemed to make the strongest impact-I think also of Michelle Lou's tumultuous "HoneyDripper" and Jürg Frey's ethereal Third String Quartet-conventional forms were hardly depleted. George Benjamin's neo-medieval opera "Written on Skin" offered visions of refined savagery; György Kurtág's Beckett opera "Fin de Partie" had the aspect of the last twentieth-century masterpiece. Andrew Norman's "Sustain" and John Luther Adams's "Become Ocean" sketched fresh futures for orchestral music. The latter's "Inuksuit," performed on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, gave a glimpse of a utopia in sound. It was a decade of sprawling music-theatre spectacles, operatic or otherwise. None was more astounding than Yuval Sharon's citywide Los Angeles fable "Hopscotch," although two Stockhausen productions-the Birmingham Opera's "Mittwoch" and the Holland Festival's "aus licht"-came close. I also cherish memories of Peter Sellars's St. Matthew Passion with the Berlin Philharmonic; of the touring revival of Philip Glass's "Einstein on the Beach"; and of Patrice Chéreau's valedictory staging of "Elektra" in Aix-en-Provence, with a hypnotic vocal standoff between Evelyn Herlitzius and Waltraud Meier. The Met made amends for its "Ring" debacle by presenting Kaija Saariaho's "L'Amour de Loin" and by mounting John Adams's "The Death of Klinghoffer" in the face of a misbegotten protest. The Los Angeles Philharmonic kept its place at the forefront of American classical music, delivering a stupendous centennial season. The New York Philharmonic began the decade with formidable programming under Alan Gilbert. At Carnegie Hall, the Minnesota Orchestra and the Oregon Symphony proved that smaller-budgeted orchestras can outpace international heavyweights. The strongest instrumental début of the decade was that of Igor Levit, in 2014; the pianist's subsequent achievements have exceeded heady expectations. The same may be said of the conductor Mirga Gra?inytė-Tyla, who made her American début, at the Hollywood Bowl, in the same year. As for the established stars of the profession, none gave more satisfaction than Yo-Yo Ma, who, in a solo Bach outing at the Bowl, held a crowd of seventeen thousand spellbound. For the better part of three hours, the machine stayed still. Notable performances of 2019 Philip Venables's "4.48 Psychosis" at the Prototype Festival, January 6th Thomas Adès's Piano Concerto in Boston, March 7th Tyshawn Sorey at the Kennedy Center, March 29th Stockhausen's "Licht" in Amsterdam, May 31st to June 2nd Meredith Monk's "atlas" at the L.A. Phil, June 11th "The Black Clown" at Mostly Mozart, July 26th David Byrne's "American Utopia," October 31st The Danish String Quartet in Berkeley, November 10th Hans Abrahamsen's "The Snow Queen" at the Royal Danish Opera, December 3rd Chaya Czernowin's "Heart Chamber" at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, December 6th   Notable recordings of 2019 Bruckner, Symphony No. 9; Manfred Honeck conducting the Pittsburgh Symphony (Reference) Weinberg, Symphonies Nos. 2 and 21; Mirga Gra?inytė-Tyla conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, with the Kremerata Baltica and Gidon Kremer (DG) Beethoven, Complete Piano Sonatas; Igor Levit (Sony) "Prism II": Bach, Fugue in B Minor, Beethoven, Quartet Opus 130; Schnittke, Third Quartet; Danish String Quartet (ECM)

Don Liuzzi, left, chief timpanist and percussion chair for the Philadelphia Symphony, teaches approaches to drum rolls on the snare drum to Bellefontaine Middle School percussionists Wednesday during a visit by the DePue Brothers Band throughout the day with Bellefontaine High School and Middle School orchestra members and BMS eighth-grade band members. The musical ensemble also performs for Benjamin Logan Elementary School students today and conducts a workshop with Benjamin Logan High School band members prior to A Magical Grassical Christmas concert at 7 p.m. tonight at the Holland Theatre, where tickets are still available for $25 to $40. The DePue Brothers are highly celebrated group of four brothers originally from Bowling Green who have pursued professional careers as violinists. The ensemble is now eight members deep and also represents the Indianapolis Symphony and some of the top touring bluegrass bands. The local school performances were made possible by the Bellefontaine Rotary Club, Logan County Electric Cooperative and the Flo Ann Easton Sours Grant. (CHRIS WESTHOFF PHOTO) SEE THE Bellefontaine Examiner PAGE

While war films have been made since the dawn of the entertainment medium, you've probably never seen one quite like "1917." Utilizing a technique that makes the film feel as if it was done in only one, long take, "1917" has an intensity and immersive feeling that you previously haven't seen in many movies in this genre. And in honor of the film's impending release, as well as the soundtrack coming several days sooner, we are thrilled to give our readers a chance to listen to an exclusive track from the film's score composed by Thomas Newman. We can rave about the score all day, as it's a perfect accompaniment to director Sam Mendes‘ intense war film, but it appears that Newman is already getting plenty of love from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which nominated the score for a Golden Globe. READ THE FULL PLAYLIST & WATCH THE VIDEO