REVIEWSLeon Fleisher: A Piano Legend At 80July 24, 2008 
Pianist Leon Fleisher turns 80 years old today. He's considered one of the great pianists of the past century, although for a significant portion of his career he was forced to play with only one hand.
Tim Page, a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and professor of music and jounalism at the University of Southern California, picks some of Fleisher's finest recordings, highlighting the great musician in both stages of his amazing career.
Franz Schubert: Der Tod Und Das Madchen July 21, 2008 
Musical history is peppered with stories of luke-warm or downright disastrous premieres of now-beloved works, from riots over Stravinsky's Rite of Spring to an under-rehearsed orchestra and over-stuffed programme for Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. The path to greatness rarely runs smoothly, it seems. So it was for Schubert's Der Tod und das Mädchen, or Death and the Maiden, which was originally received with ''by no means unanimous approval''. Perhaps if the Jerusalem Quartet had been around back then, things may have gone better.
James Blackshaw: Celebration In A Minor Key July 18, 2008 
The fingerstyle-guitar renaissance of the last five years has produced some phenomenal talents, most notably those showcased in the three-volume-strong Imaginational Anthem series. The many diverse talents include Jack Rose and Ben Reynolds, but 27-year-old James Blackshaw has come to the fore. And while anyone playing guitar soli is bound to be compared to John Fahey, the self-taught Blackshaw comes to the 12-string guitar with a beautifully clean sound and a structure more like that of Terry Riley.
`Soldaten' Moves 974 People but Not One Heart: Review (Update1) July 08, 2008 The Park Avenue Armory is the site of ``Die Soldaten,'' Bernd Alois Zimmermann's 1965 12-tone opera in a gargantuan production imported to Manhattan from Germany for the Lincoln Center Festival. It fills out what used to be the Drill Hall of the elite Seventh Regiment, whose drills may have been more musical than Zimmermann's opera.
The buzz on The Fly July 08, 2008 The Fly didn’t soar, but it didn’t crash and burn either.
Orchestra takes on 'Boheme' at Mann July 03, 2008 Opera, staged or in concert, has been an intermittent and not especially well-adjusted visitor to the Mann Center for the Performing Arts. No mystery why: Operatic needs are numerous and specific in ways that don't sit well in an all-purpose venue. And opera in any setting has so many components that budgets go up and prospects of total success down. So respect and gratitude are in order for the Philadelphia Orchestra's coming so far out of its comfort zone to present a concert performance of La Boheme on Tuesday under Rossen Milanov, even if amid so many compromises you wondered if the effort was worth it.
`The Fly' opera is buzz of Paris season July 02, 2008 Be afraid, be very afraid: David Cronenberg's 1986 horror flick, "The Fly," has undergone a bizarre metamorphosis. It's now an opera.
Halle Orchestra / Elder, St Paul's Cathedral, London June 30, 2008 Acoustics are fascinating. Clothe your auditorium in velvet and the sound is devoured without trace; clad it in polished wood, and it pings straight back. Fan-shaped halls dissipate sound, but the perfect acoustic form remains the humble shoebox. For mystery and suggestiveness, though, you can't beat a big church: the side-chapels give the sound back transformed, and in St Paul's, with its multiple echo-chambers, the effect can be magical.
Rossini Soirées Musicales June 24, 2008 Between the ages of 19 and 37, Giacomi Rossini wrote 40 operas. He then turned his back on the genre for the rest of his life. Thankfully for us, he didn't spurn vocal music per se; in addition to his Stabat Mater and Petite Messe Solennelle, he composed three collections of songs, Soirées Musicales, Péchés De Vieillesse and La Regatta Veneziana, many of which were performed at the Parisian salon evenings he hosted with his wife. This selection of them for Hyperion is arresting, intimate and evocative in equal measure.
Last Night's TV: Strung out but still hitting the high notes June 18, 2008 On paper, "A Trip to Asia: on the Road with the Berlin Philharmonic" looked like terrible TV. For a start, it was about classical music, which apart from having its connotations (old- fashioned, elitist) typically goes on for ages and involves people sitting more or less still. Worse, it was about classical music played by a German orchestra, which implies a) humourlessness ("In Germany," a piccolo-player pointed out, "everything's taken seriously") and b) subtitles, a phenomenon that has all but vanished from the main terrestrial channels. To top it all off, this being in the Imagine... strand, it started with Alan Yentob explaining what we were about to see and why it was so interesting, which as far as I'm concerned is about as alluring as the message on the front of a cigarette carton explaining that you're about to harm your unborn child and/or give yourself cancer. Mind you, I'm a non-smoker, so what do I know? Maybe that's all part of the attraction.
Luminato: Kindness, Freedom and Friendship Shine in New Opera June 15, 2008 
Playing at the Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs in the heart of downtown Toronto, Sanctuary Song is a new "Opera for All Ages" that combines theatre, music, dance and multimedia effects on an intimate stage to capture the fascinating story of Sydney, the elephant.
KUSC is making classical music relevant June 10, 2008 In the last year, listeners to classical music radio in Los Angeles have noticed something different about segments of the weekday sound of KUSC-FM (91.5) -- evidence of human beings talking to them live between the symphonies and concertos of Beethoven, Mozart and Brahms. It's a change from the public station's deliberately generic classical programming that for the last nine years was prerecorded for distribution to more than 50 other outlets across the country with as little trace of Los Angeles or the announcers' personalities as possible.
Il Trovatore, Opera Holland Park, London June 08, 2008 Lampooned by the Marx Brothers and famously difficult to cast, Il Trovatore was always going to be a risky season opener for Opera Holland Park. Cursed with a lurid back-story of burning gypsies and abducted babies, and hampered by a love-triangle that Verdi saw as a hackneyed distraction from the central tragedy, the opera strains under the weight of its themes: maternal love, fraternal love, freedom, duty, superstition.
On Music: Young Musician revamp insults artists and viewers June 06, 2008 Julian Lloyd Webber suggests that the BBC needs to go back to the drawing board with the Young Musician of the Year competition.
Olivier Messiaen, Chamber Works June 05, 2008 
A particularly evocative description exists of the 1941 premiere of Messiaen's Quatuor pour le fin du temps. The performance took place far away from the comfortable happiness of a concert hall; a hut in Stalag VIII-A, the German Prisoner-of-war camp in which Messiaen was interned and where he had written the work. Yet despite, or perhaps because of the appalling situation, this was a special performance. The French-language camp newspaper later recounted that ''the last note was followed by a moment of silence which established the sovereign mastery of the music''. For the Hebrides Ensemble's performance of this work to grip me in a similar spell through a CD player in a comfortable London flat, is testament to the breathtaking sensitivity and depth of their playing.
Classical music: Rediscovering Kapell June 02, 2008 A new CD project offers restored works from American pianist William Kapell's final tour.
'La Cenerentola' succeeds as light, animated comedy May 30, 2008 An increased delight in the music of Gioachino Rossini is one of the rewards of growing older. Serious young listeners tend to want heavy meaning, big emotion and Mahlerian metaphysics from their entertainments and might dismiss a resolutely cheery, determinedly hedonist comic opera such as "La Cenerentola" as fluff. And so it is — but brilliant fluff, animated throughout by sheer joy in the sublime and silly mystery of being alive.
Idomeneo, Barbican, London May 28, 2008 Mozart's first operatic masterpiece is about the voice as a vehicle for emotion, rather than about plot, and he laboured mightily to realise this with his original cast. But it was uphill work: his Idomeneo was well past his prime, and his Idamante was so inexperienced that he had to coach him like a child. "That boy has no ability whatever," Mozart wrote to his father, going on to reveal what he looked for in his soloists: "He has no intonation – no method – no feeling." There were no such problems with the team fielded by violinist-conductor Fabio Biondi in this concert performance at the Barbican.
Eschenbach as 2 separate artists May 22, 2008 
What future title, if any, Christoph Eschenbach will hold with the Philadelphia Orchestra is unclear. Pianist-in-residence might be the most valuable one to the city's musical health.
Review: 'Carmina Burana' overshadows young composer's premiere May 08, 2008 Funny how concerts grow and change in front of your ears, upturning expectations. Tuesday, I attended the California Symphony's season-ending concert in Walnut Creek, expecting the night's news to be generated by Mason Bates, the 31 year-old composer with a parallel career as Masonic, a dance club DJ and electronica artist. Bates, from Oakland, is developing a critical mass of important commissions: from the San Francisco Symphony, Chanticleer and the National Symphony Orchestra, to name just three.
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