The Orchestra of St. Luke's has achieved a coup in hiring the gifted young Spanish conductor Pablo Heras-Casado as its next principal conductor. He made his Berlin Philharmonic debut earlier this fall and has drawn praise for several New York-area appearances; I admired his pinpoint, dynamic work with ICE at an all-Stravinsky concert at Mostly Mozart last summer. He will lead Ensemble ACJW on Dec. 16.... Over the next few days, ISSUE Project Room is hosting another "Darmstadt" festival, highlighting classics of the international avant-garde. Feldman's For Christian Wolff is heard tonight; on Saturday there will be the annual reading of Terry Riley's In C, which, ironically, was greeted as a hoax when it was played in Darmstadt in 1969. But the most notable event will occur on Friday night, when Joe Drew, of Analog Arts, presents the New York premiere of Stockhausen's final electronic piece, Cosmic Pulses, and picks up his trumpet to perform the "Trompete" section of Orchestra Finalists, from Mittwoch.... Andrew Patner reports that Andreas Mitisek will succeed Brian Dickie as the general director of Chicago Opera Theater, one of America's most vigorous small companies. Mitisek retains his current post as head of the Long Beach Opera.... James Matheson has received the hefty Charles Ives Living award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His Violin Concerto will receive its premiere at the Chicago Symphony next week.... Dominic Irving's contemporary-classical Bullshit Generator is endless fun for the whole family. ("My latest composition explores the boundaries between spaces and elements," etc.) Several program notes at the recent SONiC Festival may have been generated with a beta version of this software.... Listen online to a striking new piece by Andrew Norman, courtesy of Orpheus.
