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The Collegiate Chorale Receives National Endowment for the Arts Grant, Will Go Toward Concert and CD Recording of Kurt Weill and Franz Werfel's 'The Road of Promise'
How Re-Establishing Diplomatic Ties with Cuba Will Change the Arts
The restoration of diplomatic and commercial ties between the United States and Cuba will not only hit us politically but will also have a profound effect on music and the arts.Though battling bureaucratic laws, the cultural exchange between the U.S. and Cuba has not been lost in recent years. Even before this week’s announcement, musicians have been traveling to perform in the previous out-of-bounds nation. Arturo O’Farrill, a New Yorker, was performing at the Havana International Jazz Festival with his Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, while Cuban flutist Maraca was in New York preparing to play this weekend at Jazz at Lincoln Center.President Barack Obama’s “new approach” to Cuban policy will make it easier for American artists to travel to Cuba to perform and vice versa. Cuba could even plausibly become a profitable tourist destination for the first time in five decades. The new policy can end need for time-consuming security checks that often leave Cubans who want to perform in the United States in limbo. Easing commercial restrictions could allow American presenters to begin paying fees to the Cuban artists they bring to the United States, who by law are now allowed only smaller per diem payments and travel reimbursements. Universal Music Classic and Deutsche Grammophon Release Mohammed Fairouz Album Titled 'Follow, Poet'
Universal Music Classics will release a new album on the Deutsche Grammophon imprint of work by Mohammed Fairouz titled "Follow, Poet," Jan. 27. The album marks the composer’s debut on the Yellow label, and the first release in the Universal Music Classic’s Return to Language series.The Return to Language series was created by Universal Music Classics President/CEO Elizabeth Sobol, a lifelong lover of literature. Sobol says it was only natural that the series be launched with Fairouz’s album."There is a deep humanity and civic devotion to Mohammed’s music," she says. "For him, music isn’t an abstract art — it has a higher purpose.”The musical works on this album, "Audenesque" and "Sadat," each exalt the transformative power of language through different means: one poetic, one oratorical. In "Audenesque," Fairouz sets verse by the great 20th-century English poet W.H. Auden and late Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney. With "Sadat," the composer evokes in an instrumental work the stirring life-story of slain Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.
