REVIEWSA Former Secretary of State Has an Audience With the QueenJuly 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.
Spare Times: For Children May 20, 2010 The musicians in "PaGAGnini," at the New Victory Theater, miss cues, go off on tangents, lose their focus, abuse their instruments (and one another) and produce sounds not often heard from elegant string quartets: a tortured whine, a twisted groan. But their studied imperfection always serves the cause of comedy and even that of classical music. By encouraging their young audiences to laugh, they also lead them to listen, and their antics demonstrate both the versatility of centuries-old pieces and their own considerable gifts. No one does a parody better than a virtuoso.
Ólafur Arnalds …and They Have Escaped the Weight of Darkness Review May 18, 2010 Ólafur Arnalds has found inspiration for his latest collection in the slow-motion celluloid poetry of Werckmeister Harmonies, the elegiac fantasy of Hungarian director Béla Tarr. In particular, the Icelandic composer has drawn on that film’s opening sequence (a line from which provides this album with its title), which sees the chief protagonist delivering an emotive monologue on the processes of a solar eclipse; patently a metaphor for the resurrection of hope from the depths of despair.
A monkey out of Macbeth May 13, 2010 DIAN FOSSEY did it in the forest with gorillas, William Boyd in fiction with chimpanzees. Now a Scottish composer, Tom Cunningham, has cast baboons in an opera called “The Okavango Macbeth” to a libretto by Alexander McCall Smith.
Review: Dudamel and the L.A. Philharmonic deliver a dynamic double bill in Davies Hall May 11, 2010 Gustavo Dudamel is the hottest commodity in classical music — in decades. Yet the 29 year-old conductor isn't a physically imposing figure on the podium. He is short. He is chunky. Appearing at Davies Symphony Hall on Monday for the first of two concerts that have been sold out for six months, he didn't look as youthful and bright-eyed as he did on his last visit, two years ago.
Rolando Villazon, Royal Festival Hall, London May 10, 2010 Not since Carreras, Domingo and Pavarotti serenaded Rome with "Nessun dorma" in triplicate has a tenor generated so much excitement away from the opera house. The standing ovation at the close of Monday's post-op, post-pop, comeback recital of Handel arias with Paul McCreesh, Lucy Crowe and The Gabrieli Players was a given.
Christoph Willibald Gluck Orphée et Eurydice Review April 29, 2010 Conductor Jesus López-Cobos and Madrid's Teatro Real opt for Gluck’s 1774 French revision of the opera, recorded far less than the 1762 original or Berlioz’s 19th century edition. Besides additional music, the most significant update was the transposition of the male lead from castrato (today sung by soprano or mezzo) to virile high tenor. Step forward Juan Diego Florez, ostensibly this release’s star attraction. Florez is famed as a bel canto phenomenon in Rossini and Donizetti, but Gluck’s simpler galant style is another matter.
Rufus Wainwright should keep up the classical experiments April 27, 2010 His opera was mauled, and his Berlioz song-cycle reportedly had people running for the exits. Yet Rufus Wainwright is to be applauded for having a go.
Piano Circus April 19, 2010 Set in a circle, with 60 degrees (or 10 minutes of the clock) – per keyboard, Piano Circus are specialists in the aural tricks repertoire. Pinpointing the subtle shifts of rhythm, pulse and harmony demands acute concentration from players and audience alike, yet the effect of the pulsing ostinati is undeniably hypnotic.
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