An explosive revelation in Paul Morley's fine piece on the Huddersfield Festival: Cage, Boulez, and Messiaen once dined together at the Huddersfield Pizza Hut.... The Serbian-born composer Djuro Zivkovic has won the 2014 Grawemeyer Award, for his work On the Guarding of the Heart.... The fascinating and difficult-to-classify Icelandic composer Anna Þhorvaldsdóttir is featured Thursday in Miller Theatre's Composer Portrait series.... Kyle Gann, the godfather of new-music blogging (among many other distinctions), makes waves at the ISCM in Vienna.... No one understands Parsifal, with the possible exception of the Boulezian.... Sundry pundits have analyzed the demise of New York City Opera; it's another thing to witness the event through the eyes of a singer, namely Nick Phan.... Notable operatic rarities playing in New York next week: Virgil Thomson's The Mother of Us All (which received an unforgettable City Opera production in 2000) at the Manhattan School of Music (Dec. 11-15) and Strauss's Feuersnot in a concert performance by the American Symphony (Dec. 15).... Somebody loves Martinů: at a recent Sotheby's auction, the manuscript of the Czech master's Fourth Symphony sold for 177000 Euros, far above evaluation.... I'm deeply saddened to hear of the death of Marion Lignana Rosenberg, one of the most passionate and perceptive of opera critics. Her last piece for WQXR ended with a salute to Joyce DiDonato and these words: "Here’s to countless voices singing out in freedom, dignity, and joy in 2014 and beyond."
