Music
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Dominick Argento at Carnegie Hall
New York City Opera Gives Composer a Birthday Bash
By: - Nov 10th, 2017Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, Dominick Argento, celebrated his 90th birthday at Carnegie Hall. New York City Opera in its wonderful new incarnation mounted two of the composer's one act monologues in dramatic productions.
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Bernstein at the New York Philharmonic
Alan Gilbert Conducts
By: - Nov 06th, 2017Americans who do not live in the bubbling cauldron of New York City, claim to long for a simpler, easier time. When picket fences were white, the mail was delivered regularly, and people's lives echoed the covers of trite magazines sold in supermarket checkout lines. However, New Yorkers know different. That difference was on proud display Saturday night as Alan Gilbert led the second of three programs at the New York Philharmonic dedicated to the music of Leonard Bernstein.
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Psalms at the White Light Festival
Touring New York Churches to Hear Music
By: - Nov 05th, 2017The Psalms Experience presented by the White Light Festival of Lincoln Center includes nearly one thousand years of musical settings by 150 different composers. World renowned choirs collaborate to present songs from the Book of Psalms. Each concert has a unifying theme, such as suffering, power, and powerlessness.
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National Chorale Celebrates 50th
Everett McCorvey a Brilliant Leader
By: - Nov 04th, 2017To listen to Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms and then the raunchy, life-affirming Carmina Burana is heaven. Or hell, if you prefer it. Sometimes Carl Orff, the composer of Carmina Burana does both and it is these moments, like love joined in a soprano's stratasphere, that give particular pleasure.
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The Exterminating Angel by Thomas Ades
American Premier Has Gleaming Cast
By: - Nov 01st, 2017The creation of new works remains how the art of opera continues, against steep odds and media indifference, to grow and survive. This week, the Metropolitan Opera did their bit by opening Thomas Adès' latest opus: The Exterminating Angel.
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Steven Osborne Performs Vingt Regards
A Messiaen Marathon at White Light
By: - Nov 01st, 2017The Stanley Kaplan Penthouse at Lincoln Center is a special space. When it is darkened, lights twinkle in the windows and reflections go out into the night. Here Steven Osborne, a consummate pianist, performed Olivier Messiaen's iconic "Vingts Regards sur l'enfant." We swirled in mystery, yearning and the power of faith.
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Conrad Tao, Charmaine Lee and Nate Wooley
Brooklyn's Memorial Hall Hosts a Ceremony
By: - Oct 31st, 2017Tao is everywhere. Tucked into the back of a stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, he had the nerve to portray the iconic Glenn Gould in David Lang’s opera ‘loser.’ He is in the bowels of a church for a Crypt Session, and now at Roulette, a venue created to honor Dada and chance music. He is a thrilling artist.
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Berlioz' Damnation of Faust at BSO
A Dramatic Legend Rides High
By: - Oct 29th, 2017Damnation of Faust turned out to be one of Berlioz' most popular compositions. It was the first work in which he wrote the libretto himself. Berlioz loved Virgil, Shakespeare, and Goethe above all. He could not entrust the words of these authors to anyone else. In Damnation, we have a great presentation of the Faust story. The Boston Symphony, Tanglewood chorus and thrilling soloists brought Berlioz safely to heaven and hell.
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Dolores Claiborne by Tobias Picker
New York City Opera Hits a Home Run, Again
By: - Oct 27th, 2017New York City Opera's production of Tobias Picker's latest opera, Dolores Claiborne, honors the composer in a riveting theatrical presentation. Oliver Sacks explored the musical brain in his Musicophilia. The connection between the two hemispheres of the brain is enlarged demonstrably in talented musicians. So too a section of the hippocampus. Picker, who began composing at four, was studied by Sacks. Whether or not his brain reflects musicality because he started playing and composing early, or because he was born with this ability, remains to be answered. What is clear in Dolores Claiborne, as produced by NYCO, is how great his talent for opera is.
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Orchestra dell' Accademia Nationale at Carnegie
Barbara Hannigan Sings Sciarrino
By: - Oct 22nd, 2017Sir Antonio Pappano has made his mark at Royal Covent Garden over the past decade and a half. He is also the music director of the Orchestra dell' Accademia Nationale di Santa Cecilia (Rome). They return to Carnegie Hall after an almost half century absence. Pappano presented a work composer Salvatore Sciarrino wrote especially for the great and adventuresome soprano (and conductor) Barbara Hannigan. Mahler's Sixth Symphony followed.
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L’Orchestre Symphonique at Carnegie
The Idea of North
By: - Oct 21st, 2017L’Orchestre symphonique de Montréal is one of the finest symphonic ensembles in North America. They are a stellar symphonic ensemble with a long history and a sound all their own, combining precise European string playing with the lusty, leather-lunged brass one associated with this continent.
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Prince of Egypt World Premiere
Music and Lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and Book by Philip LaZebnik
By: - Oct 21st, 2017This is a musical entertainment for the many, not a Sunday School lesson for the few.
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Boston Lyric Opera Tosca
Fine Cast but a Misguided Production
By: - Oct 20th, 2017Puccini's "Tosca" remains one of the most popular operas in the world 117 years after its debut. Today with its portrait of fascist tyrants taking women forcibly for their own pleasure, it has renewed relevance. In her American debut Russian soprano Elena Stikhina made the role her own.
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Gordon Getty Unearths Ghosts
A Pair of Seasonal Operas
By: - Oct 20th, 2017The Center for Contemporary Opera is presenting the premier of a pair of operas by Gordon Getty. One is based on Edgar Allan Poe’s The House of Usher. The other, on Oscar Wilde’s sympathetic take on a ghost who cannot die, poor guy.
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Turandot at the Metropolitan Opera
James Morris' 1000th performance at the Met
By: - Oct 18th, 2017Turandot is Giacomo Puccini’s final, unfinished work. It is a a grand fantasy of legendary China as reimagined through the lens of Italian romanticism. It is a farm tale, the story of an ice-hearted princess and the fearless Prince who wins her hand. It is seen (wrongly) as the end point of the genre of Italian opera. It is also, along with La bohème, the last of the Metropolitan Opera’s giant Franco Zeffirelli productions, crowded extravaganzas that evoke the opulence of a bygone era. (In this case, we’re talking about the 1980s.)
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Barnatan and Weilerstein at Carnegie
Woo Too with Mendelssohn and a New Steven Mackay
By: - Oct 18th, 2017Listening to two great artists performing cello sonatas at Zankel Hall, you are let in on a secret that should be widely broadcast. In intimate chamber music, performed with only two instruments, you enter the deep, developed world of great composers whose work is the subject of conversation. Chorale to recitative, pluck to bowed, arpeggios to long, sweet lines. Never a moment to rest as we are pulled closer and closer to the essence of a composer.
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Musical America Announces Awardees
Andris Nelsons, Sondra Radvanovsky, Mason Bates Honored
By: - Oct 17th, 2017The prestigious Musical America annual awards have been announced. The BSO musical director Andris Nelsons is artist of the year. Sondra Radvanovsky is vocalist. We interviewed Nelsons in 2011 before his first concert with the BSO at Carnegie Hall. Radvanofvsky has been on our radar since Peter Gelb tried to oust her and Placido Dominago stormed into his office and told him he could not remove an important artist from the Met roster.
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Thomas Ades and Friends at Carnegie Hall
Warm up for The Exterminating Angel
By: - Oct 16th, 2017Thomas Adès will be Artistic Partner to the Boston Symphony Orchestra for the next three years, helping to fill their Maestro's wish for abundant new music. Adès' gifts as a composer were on display in Zankel Hall. Principals from the cast of his third opera, about to have its North American premier, sang. The music, his own, and that of Schubert, Britten and Purcell among others, could count as the music of his friends, from long ago and now. As a pianist, Adès has a special touch.
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American Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall
Doing What's Right
By: - Oct 13th, 2017A peculiar sense of existential dread hung over Wednesday night’s concert at Carnegie Hall, the first of the young season featuring the American Symphony Orchestra under the baton of its long time music director Leon Botstein. For this concert, titled “The Sounds of Democracy”, Botstein chose 20th century music by Leonard Bernstein, Roger Sessions and Aaron Copland, leading lights of American music in the last century but now largely ignored by the fast-food reality-television culture of the 21st.
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Agostino Steffani's Vocal Duets Rediscovered
Italian-born Composer Worked in Germany
By: - Oct 12th, 2017Agostino Steffani (1653-1728) was important in his day, serving as a priest and diplomat as well as a composer, but he was forgotten after his death. The BEMF has devoted much of its attention to resuscitating his vocal works over the past 6 years. Its most recent research led to an enchanting concert of vocal duets, featuring local favorite Amanda Forsythe and colleagues from around the world.
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Opera at the Apollo
We Shall Not Be Moved Triumphs
By: - Oct 09th, 2017We Shall Not Be Moved opened at the Apollo last weekend. Under the bright lights on the Apollo marquee on 125th Street in Harlem, the gathering crowd was dressed in high fashion, from tinsel and glitter to designer jeans and platform heels. Talk was all of the subject matter and the artists who had created this opera. Bill T. Jones is well-known, but the composer and librettist not so. People were going to see the work of their own community.
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Crossing at BAM
Whitman Focus of Composer Matthew Aucoin
By: - Oct 08th, 2017Crossing premiered at ART in Cambridge, Mass. in 2015. Now it comes to BAM as part of the Next Wave Festival.
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Boulez at the Park Avenue Armory
Repons from IRCAM
By: - Oct 06th, 2017The Park Avenue Armory is presenting one of Pierre Boulez’ signature compositions, the first one to use IRCAM with all its innovation. Relatively simple material can be made to acquire sophisticated layers without losing the sound of its origins. Repons is the first product of IRCAM’s 4X computer.
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Carnegie Hall Opens with Philadelphia Orchestra
Four-Armed is Fore-Warned
By: - Oct 06th, 2017the original plan was to have Rhapsody's piano part played by Lang Lang, the international piano sensation and one of the biggest stars of this new firmament of young classical artists. Then Lang suffered an arm injury and plans were changed. The program still featured Rhapsody, but in a version fortwo pianos. The second was manned by Chick Corea, a beloved figure from the world of jazz. And serving as Lang Lang's left hand, his pupil Maxim Lando. At 14 years old, Lando is a product of Lang's International Music Foundation.
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Lincoln Center and NY Philharmonic Abandon Sound Plan
Mostly Mozart Offers a Repair Model
By: - Oct 05th, 2017The sound at David Geffen Hall during the fall and spring seasons is often awful. A six hundred million dollar plan, which would have brought the Hall to Lincoln Center Plaza level has been abandoned. Now there is talk of Mostly Mozart-ing the Hall.
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