It's this week in classical music, an update on what's happening in the classical music world; I'm Randy Kinkel.

A team of experts and musicologists are pouring over nine manuscripts found in a polish monastery to see if they might be the works of Mozart. According to a member of the team "The scores could be compilations from various Mozart works, or compositions by other authors just signed in his name, or - in the luckiest case for us - they could be unknown authentic Mozart," But a source at the Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg said it was "Highly unlikely" that new works by Mozart would be discovered. From 1784 until his death, Mozart kept a catalogue of his works, and that catalogue does not contain any major works that we are missing.

The scores in question were copied for the monastery's own musical ensemble, which was active between the 16th and early 20th centuries. The question Scholars have is whether monastery musicians copied Mozart Scores that have since been lost or are missing. SO far the team has identified four of the scores bearing Mozart's name to be misidentified.

Cellist Julian Lloyd Weber and Composer Michael Wolters and an ensemble of students from Birmingham conservatory to present "And now, The News", a multimedia installation in which the musicians will accompany a live broadcast of BBC news on June 5th as a part of the new Generation Arts Festival. Wolters has written pieces in a variety of potentially appropriate moods, but the performers won't know which ones to play until moments before the broadcast. Even then, the players are encouraged to improvise to better fit the music to the words and images. Lloyd Weber said, ""I've always believed that classical music should be a living, breathing thing involved with contemporary life and culture, and this is part of that. It may work wonderfully well, it may not, but it has an experimental nature, and that's what makes it interesting."

It was a book, it became a movie, and it even won a Nobel Prize, but now Al Gore's "AN Inconvenient truth" is headed for the opera stage. La Scala Officials say Italian composer Giorgio Battestelli has been coimmissioned to produce an opera based on the work of the former vice president and Presidential candidate. The Opera is scheduled to premier in the 2011 season at the famed Milan Opera House, La Scala.

For more on these and other items and events, go to the website kbaq.org, be listening each week at this time for another update, and join me every weekday at noon for the Mozart Buffet, an hour of music by Mozart and his contemporaries. I'm Randy Kinkel, for KBAQ's "This week in Classical Music", on listener-supported 89-five KBAQ, Phoenix, a service of Rio Salado College and Arizona state university.

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June 1, 2008 by Randy Kinkel courtesy of KBAQ.

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Title: June 1, 2008
Author: Randy Kinkel
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