A musically lavish edition of the Lincoln Center Festival is now under way. On Wednesday night, Yarn/Wire presents world premières of works by Tristan Murail, Misato Mochizuki, and Raphaël Cendo. Those who are unable to attend can watch a live stream from the LC Fest site. The Cleveland Orchestra presents three programs, including Strauss's complete Daphne; read Zachary Woolfe for a discerning status report on the orchestra. The big event, though, is Heiner Goebbels's production of Harry Partch's Delusion of the Fury, on July 23 and 24. Ensemble Musikfabrik, international superstars of modern music, will perform, in every sense... Hannah Edgar, the University of Chicago student who inspired my Strauss piece last summer (and who spoke beautifully at the Andrew Patner Celebration in March), has started up a blog called Dialoges, with her classmate MJ Chen... Good new material has cropped up on Q2. You can hear Meredith Monk's quartet Stringsongs — presented in conjunction with an absorbing Meet the Composer profile of Monk — and also some concerts from this spring's Look and Listen Festival.... In 2012, Boston magazine published a remarkable piece, by Jennie Dorris, about percussion auditions at the Boston Symphony. Somehow I overlooked it at the time; it's cropped again on classical-music social media. It is sharply observed, and the portrait it gives of American orchestral culture is not especially flattering. Frank Epstein's comment is most telling: “The technique on the instruments has grown, but what hasn’t grown is the innate musicianship, the interpretive abilities of players."
