REVIEWSProm 62: Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester/ Blomstedt, Royal Albert HallSeptember 02, 2010 Like the Matthias Grünewald paintings that inspired it, Paul Hindemith’s Symphony “Mathis der Maler” sounds somehow, and quite miraculously, to be illuminated from within.
Concert Review: WA Symphony Orchestra August 31, 2010 Philip Glass is one of the most popular and controversial composers of recent decades. His approachable minimalist style and political subject matter give his music broad relevance.
Chamber Prom 6, Stile Antico, Cadogan Hall August 25, 2010 Stile Antico’s concert of 16th century settings of the ‘Song of Songs’ opened with a piece by Jacobus Clemens non Papa (1510-1555), and it might have been worth saying who he was, and how he came by his very weird name. And it would definitely have been worth sketching in the background to this great devotional text, with its fascinating parallel ramifications in Marian Christianity and Sufi Islam, in which human and divine love are likewise conflated.
BBC Proms: Danish National Symphony Orchestra / Kraggerud / Dausgaard, Royal Albert Hall, London August 16, 2010 If some musical exhumations were better left underground, others rectify injustices, and thus it was with Rued Langgaard's Music of the Spheres, which has now, after a 92-year wait, had its British premiere.
For better or worse, 10-year-old 'opera singer' Jackie Evancho's got talent August 12, 2010 I'm not sure what to make of the latest phenom from the America's Got Talented Idols or whatever it is, but 10-year-old Jackie Evancho of Pittsburgh certainly caught my attention with her curiously mature-sounding account of "O mio babbino caro" from Puccini's "Gianni Schicchi."
A chorus and a string section get lost in the woods August 10, 2010 Pop’s crush on classical music continues apace with this eccentric debut album from Lost in the Trees, a collective from North Carolina who, in their own words, “have discovered a new genre called orchestral folk pop.” Apparently this genre was hidden somewhere between Vivaldi’s conservatory in Venice and a front porch in Appalachia.
Bar Crowd Joins the Action in Intimate ‘Boheme’: London Stage August 08, 2010 The bar staff is collecting empty glasses. Crowds of drinkers are chatting and laughing. A shifty- looking guy tries to sell pirate DVDs from a dirty bag. It’s a normal night out in London’s Soho. Then all those people suddenly start singing. Where normality ends, opera begins.
Not Your Ordinary Marching Band August 05, 2010 A casual observer at Lincoln Center on Wednesday evening might have wondered what on earth was going on when a large, eclectic crowd made a frenzied dash across 65th Street, following a ragtag band of musicians who had careened across the road like deranged pied pipers.
A Former Secretary of State Has an Audience With the Queen July 30, 2010 Heard the one about the secretary of state and the Queen of Soul? There was no question that Condoleezza Rice had been a subject of intense scrutiny for crowds far tougher than the one she faced at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts here on Tuesday. Still, this engagement was not without its own pressure. Ms. Rice, revealed as a classically trained pianist during her years in government, was here by royal edict: Aretha Franklin, having learned of Ms. Rice’s avocation, proposed a summit meeting for a charity concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Prom 13: BBC National Orchestra of Wales/ Currie/Fischer, Royal Albert Hall July 28, 2010 Making my way to my seat, I encounter Proms director Roger Wright in unusually pensive mood. Schumann didn’t sell out the Royal Albert Hall yesterday, he says, and it’s even thinner for his ‘Spring’ Symphony tonight: he glumly quotes his predecessor John Drummond’s famous dictum, that there’s no hall that looks so empty as this one when it’s half full.
Roll over, Beethoven: Richter blurs the boundaries between indie and classical July 22, 2010 Once upon a time, rock‘n’roll was for the kids. Parents recoiled at its immoral noise, clutching Perry Como records to their chests as their children rolled their eyes. For years the generations were separated: teenagers craved guitars, elders praised violins, youthful tastes discarded as newfound responsibilities demanded they behave like adults. But slowly the boundaries came down: prog rock embraced the theories of formal musical training, contemporary classical music like Steve Reich’s was embraced by the rock avant-garde, musicians started to namecheck the likes of Henryk Gorecki and Arvo Pärt.
Classical music review: Mimir Chamber proves 'Quartet for the End of Time' still has power to astonish July 14, 2010 One of history's most extraordinary musical performances happened on a cold January evening in 1941, in a Nazi prison camp at Görlitz, now in easternmost Germany. Some 400 prisoners and guards crowded into a barrack to hear a clarinetist, a violinist, a cellist and a pianist give the world premiere of French composer Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time. Messiaen himself played the battered upright. One of history's most extraordinary musical performances happened on a cold January evening in 1941, in a Nazi prison camp at Görlitz, now in easternmost Germany. Some 400 prisoners and guards crowded into a barrack to hear a clarinetist, a violinist, a cellist and a pianist give the world premiere of French composer Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time. Messiaen himself played the battered upright.
Classical music releases bring the world home June 24, 2010 In 1935, the English music critic Donald Tovey lamented that many preferred orchestral excerpts from Wagner’s operas rather than the operas themselves.
Benjamin Britten String Quartets 2 and 3 / Three Divertimenti (Elias String Quartet) Review June 22, 2010 The Elias Quartet has been steeping itself in Benjamin Britten’s world. On the cover they’re pictured on the beach near Britten’s home in Aldeburgh, gazing out to sea, absorbing the sounds, reflections and changing light that so fascinated the composer. Leader Sara Bitlloch talks of the impact the manuscript of Britten’s Third Quartet had on them when they saw it in Aldeburgh; how faint the writing was, how he’d written on only two staves rather than the four you’d expect, as his final illness sapped his strength. A few years ago they played the piece to Norbert Brainin, the former leader of the Amadeus Quartet, who’d worked on the Third Quartet with Britten and gave the premiere at Aldeburgh shortly after the composer’s death. When they reached the end there was a long silence, before Brainin simply said: “Ben wrote his own death.”
Opera's challenge is to take it easy June 19, 2010 In the world's most complicated art forms, simplicity is tough. But that's what is called for in Willibald Christoph Gluck's Orphée et Eurydice , an occasion for which the Opera Company of Philadelphia made pared-back production values not just a virtue but an eloquent artistic statement - even if Thursday's opening performance at the Kimmel Center's Perelman Theater occasionally crossed lines from simplicity to blandness to dramatic uncertainty.
Jazz, Featuring Chopin and Bach June 10, 2010 You might not think of Le Poisson Rouge as the ideal place for an organ recital: for one thing, it lacks an organ. But an organist can bring a portable one, and that is what Cameron Carpenter did on Tuesday evening, though not without some backstage drama.
Claudio Monteverdi Il Nerone, Ossia L’Incoronazione di Poppea (La Venexiana, Claudio Cavina) Review June 03, 2010 We’re dealing here with a work of both confusion and delight, Claudio Cavina and La Venexiana revelling in exalting our senses while undermining any certainties. For a start, L’Incoronazione di Poppea is by Monteverdi, right? Wrong, it seems. Almost all the evidence shows that he had little or no direct involvement, that most of the music certainly isn’t by him – especially not the blissful climactic love duet. What we may be looking at is “school of Monteverdi”, where the music was supplied by his entourage, the likes of Cavalli (who probably wrote that love duet), Ferrari, Sacrati, and (inevitably) Anon.
In 'Billy Budd,' a Cry for Kindness Pierces a Haunting Moral Grayness June 01, 2010 An inky darkness suffuses the stage at the start of the thunderous new Glyndebourne Festival Opera production of “Billy Budd,” and, even when the stage eventually brightens, a shuddering awareness of man’s capacity for evil hovers in the mist.
Florilegium/Kirkby/Blaze, Wigmore Hall, London May 25, 2010 Giovanni Battista Pergolesi - now best known for his ‘Stabat Mater’ - had a short, colourful, tragic life. The son of a shoemaker, he had a withered leg and a blazing talent which allowed him to establish himself as Italy’s leading comic-opera composer while still in his early twenties. As a conductor he attracted comic disasters - being hit on the head by an orange derisively thrown during a flop, seeing the floor of the auditorium cave in during a too-well-attended hit - but he died of tuberculosis at 26. Thereafter numerous composers leaped on his bandwagon, palming off their works as being by him. The ‘Grove Dictionary’ lists most of his instrumental works under three headings: ‘Doubtful’, ‘Extremely doubtful’, and ‘Spurious’.
Movie Review | 'Music Makes a City: A Louisville Orchestra Story' May 22, 2010 By all reasonable measures, the Louisville Orchestra shouldn't have lasted much past its founding in 1937. Ill-funded, hastily conceived and made up of part-time musicians, the ensemble was the kind of civic venture that too often collapsed under the weight of good intentions.
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