The abiding coolness that is MATA holds its annual festival April 18-20, chez Roulette. The lineup includes a foursome faceoff between the men of JACK and the women of Quartet New Generation; a composer/performer evening featuring, amid much else, Cecilia López’s Mechanical Music for Sheet Metal; and a SIGNAL concert that includes a world premiere by the notable young Italian composer and organist Francesco Filidei and Mellissa Hughes singing texts of Charles de Gaulle, via a work by David Coll. With regret, I will miss it all, because of Gayby at the Sarasota Film Festival.... The music series at the Met Museum, now under the aegis of Limor Tomer, has announced an appetizing 2012-13 season.... The pianist Jenny Q. Chai has put together a lively, ecumenical program for her recital at Zankel Hall on April 19.... On the 24th, the composer and critic Russell Platt, my esteemed New Yorker colleague, curates an evening at New York Festival of Song.... The Inuksuit fundraiser continues. Note also a fundraiser for a new Trimpin project.... Contemporary Austrian doings in NYC: Ensemble Moto Perpetuo plays the Haas "dark" quartet at Experimental Intermedia tonight; Klangforum Wien appears twice at the Austrian Cultural Forum next week.... On July 20, the Festival de Beaunes will present the world premiere of a previously unknown opera fragment by Vivaldi — the first two acts of a setting of Grazio Bracciolo's libretto Orlando furioso, dating from 1714. This is not the same work as the Orlando furioso that Vivaldi wrote in 1727, although that score does recycle two numbers from the earlier one. Federico Maria Sardelli, who made the discovery, will conduct.... Inevitably, the Titanic observances have already proved overblown and prematurely exhausting, but (Le) Poisson Rouge's presentation of Gavin Bryars's The Sinking of the Titanic, on the anniversary of the disaster, is worth noting. Imagine — when the Titanic went down, Elliott Carter was only three....
