Latest

2013

New York Arts in DC
Danny Gavigan and Tim Getman in Lisa D'Amour's Detroit at Woolly Mammoth. Photo Stan Barouh.

Detroit in Washington, at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

September 22, 2013Louise Levathes

Detroit, a play by Lisa D’Amour, which opened last Sunday at Woolly Mammoth in Washington, DC, is not really about Detroit, except as a potent symbol of the fading of the America dream. The play is set in suburbia, any suburban area around any major America city, where the promise of the good life with picnics and Saturday night dances and well-scrubbed children is harder to achieve in the current economic malaise and intrusion of violence into quiet, middle class neighborhoods everywhere.
Read More
Berkshire Review
David Finckel and Wu Han

An Interview with Wu Han and David Finckel: Life after the Emerson Quartet and an Upcoming Concert at South Mountain Concerts

September 20, 2013Michael Miller

Along with the retirement of the Tokyo String Quartet, the departure of David Finckel from the Emerson Quartet has been one of the most discussed events in the world of chamber music over the past eighteen months or so. As people who have heard their concerts know, both David Finckel and the Emerson Quartet, now with the British cellist, Paul Watkins, in place, are as rich as ever in their contributions to our well-being as humans. Wu Han and David Finckel spoke with me just today about their new post-Emerson life, which allows David to travel and play more regularly with Wu Han as a duo and as a trio with Emerson violinist Philip Setzer, who will join them at the venerable South Mountain Concerts on Sunday, September 29, 2013. They will play Beethoven Op. 1, No. 2, Shostakovich's Trio No. 2 in E Minor, Op. 67, and Dvořák's Trio in E Minor, Op. 90, the "Dumky." I hope you enjoy our conversation about their past, present, and future as much as I did.
Read More
Music
Charles Ives

MTT, James Ehnes, and the San Francisco Symphony open the season with Americans: Ives, Barber, Antheil, and Gershwin

September 9, 2013Steven Kruger

Last Friday evening dusked warm and sensuous—a rarity in this city. And at the San Francisco Symphony: one of those electric occasions to match, where everything comes together with inspiration, and the audience goes away feeling alive and happy. I don't think I have ever seen Michael Tilson Thomas so rested and intuitively joyous at the podium—American music is his specialty—and nobody since Bernstein does it so well. Thomas has a reputation for programming what amounts to narrated musical lesson-plans. Let him grab a microphone, and the dowagers in the audience get nervous.
Read More
Dance
Xiomara Reyes in Le Corsaire. Photo by MIRA.

Le Corsaire at the American Ballet Theatre

September 9, 2013Andrew Miller

What is le Corsaire? Is it a ballet? Is it entertainment — mere divertissement? Is there any difference? I believe intuitively that there is. Ballet defines itself on telling a story (even if there are exceptions) rather than presenting divertissements in vignettes, it is not a sort of artistic form of gymnastics. One more often encounters le Corsaire nowadays, at least in the west, as the extraordinary virtuoso pas de deux on its own, with its impossible leaps and lifts and turns for the man and the ballerina, and so this is what the ballet is known for, now associated especially with male virtuosity, thanks to Baryshnikov’s dancing, but the ballet presented as a whole is still a working piece of theatre.
Read More
Bard Music Festival
Clytemnestra (Liuba Sokolova) sacrifices a ram in Taneyev's Oresteia at Bard. Photo Cory Weaver.

Sergey Taneyev’s Oresteia at Bard — a Review

September 1, 2013Michael Miller

In his introductory lectures, Leon Botstein is almost always engaging and enthusiastic, except when, to make an instructive point, he discusses music he knows to be inferior , and then he is at least amusing. However, before the Sunday matinee of Taneyev's Oresteia, he conveyed a certain Cheshire Cat-like excitement, as if he had something really exceptional in store for us. The air in and around the Fisher Center was charged, and one could feel it. We were not disappointed.
Read More
Berkshire Review
John Harbison

More on Harbison’s Gatsby

August 1, 2013Michael Miller

My collleagues have already written extensively about Emmanuel Music's performance of John Harbison's opera, The Great Gatsby, both at Jordan Hall and at Tanglewood. I won't attempt a full review, but I would like to share a few thoughts about the opera and the performance, both of which I heartily admired. As performed this year at Emmanuel Church and Tanglewood, Gatsby embodied some of the best and most characteristic traditions of American opera—the setting of classic literary texts (a speciality of Mr. Harbison's) and the mixture of popular musical and theatrical elements with an infrastructure of the most cultivated and rigorous compositional technique.
Read More
Berkshire Review
Susan Davenny-Wyner, Conductor

Nicolai’s Merry Wives at the Boston Midsummer Opera and Tanglewood Tales: Jurowski and Koenigs Tell the Whole Story

August 1, 2013Lloyd Schwartz

It was James Levine’s many cancelations that most directly led to his (perhaps forced) resignation as the Boston Symphony Orchestra music director in the spring of 2011. But Levine has no monopoly on health problems and accidents. The glow of the two superlative concerts I attended at Tanglewood (July 19 and 20) was clouded over by the startling announcement that Levine’s young and healthy replacement, 34-year-old Latvian conductor Andris Nelsons, was unable to conduct the July 27 Verdi Requiem, his first scheduled concert since his appointment, because he had suffered a “severe concussion” after being “struck in the head by a door that unexpectedly swung open at his residence in Bayreuth, Germany.”
Read More
Bard Music Festival
Director Thaddeus Strassberger in rehearsal with Maria Litke as Pallas Athena and chorus on the stage of the Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Performing Arts Center, Bard College, July 17, 2013. Photo Eleanor Davis.

Sergey Ivanovich Taneyev’s Oresteia comes to Bard…then on to the Mariinsky!

July 19, 2013Michael Miller

Every summer, in the course of Bard College's Summerscape, the expansive net of entertainment, education, and enlightenment Leon Botstein and his cohorts cast about the Bard Music Festival, we get an opportunity to enjoy a rare opera, which has either fallen out of, or never entered, the basic repertory of the art form—an opera you will never see at the Met. In many cases the reasons these works disappeared is either straightforward or practical: tastes change, or the management of mainstream opera houses ceased to find it workable to engage a cast of six or eight lead singers when the most popular operas required only two. In other cases the reasons are mysterious, complex, or otherwise fascinating.
Read More
WP2Social Auto Publish Powered By : XYZScripts.com