November 2017

Recordings

A Crop of Recordings XVIII: Honegger, Bernstein, Rachmaninoff, Smetana, Vaughan Williams

This is the most fascinating Honegger CD I know—brought to us with foundation-shaking  percussion, virtuoso string and brass playing—and astonishing podium originality. Mario Venzago is a Swiss conductor who has recorded the Bruckner symphonies, some of them with this same Bern Symphony—sounding world class here. He’s the sort who takes chances with tempo, the way Bruckner conductors are either admired or forgiven for doing.
Dance

Legends & Visionaries—The New York Theatre Ballet at the Danspace Project

New York Theater Ballet continues to forge ahead. Now in its thirty-ninth season, NYTB brings new ways to look at classics together with the opportunity to see work by up-and-coming choreographers. Legends & Visionaries, presented as a tribute to the late David Vaughan, dance archivist, historian and critic, began with sweetly moving remarks by NYTB company founder and artistic director, Diana Byer, Vaughan’s friend and mentee.
Music

Ruth Sommers’ Festival Chamber Music, a Concert Series at Weill Hall (Carnegie Hall) — an Introduction

Just about a year ago I had the pleasure of discovering a New York chamber music series I hadn't heard about, Festival Chamber Music, when I came to hear Mohammed Fairouz’s No Orpheus (2009) for Mezzo Soprano and Cello, settings of poems by our Senior Editor of Art and Music, Lloyd Schwartz, who had made the trip down from Boston to read his texts before they were sung. He has heard several performances of this work since its premiere, and he was well pleased with the work of Christine Antenbring, mezzo-soprano and cellist Ruth Sommers, noting the strong differences in the performances of the work he had heard. One might be tempted to consider the use of a solo cello to do the job of a piano a gimmick, but in fact it convinced me from the very beginning—thanks to a great extent to Ruth Sommers’ eloquent, colorful, many-sided, but disciplined playing.
Music

Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia (Rome), Sir Antonio Pappano, conductor, with Martha Argerich, piano, at Carnegie Hall

Musical triumphs, like Tolstoy happy families, tend to be alike. But celebration usually breaks out following a performance, not before! I've only once witnessed the sort of screaming, foot stamping, room shaking reception Thursday's Carnegie Hall audience accorded Martha Argerich, and that was in anticipation of Sir Georg Solti's Mahler with the Chicago Symphony in the late 1960s. And fair to say, though "Solti! Solti!" always made for a great chant, screams for Argerich lasted longer. Even Karajan enthusiasts were less tireless, back in the day.  
Music

Krzysztof Urbański and Augustin Hadelich impress with the San Francisco Symphony

You never know when San Francisco will prove even weirder than you think, but Fleet Week is surely a good candidate for strangeness at the symphony. The US Navy's Blue Angels air ballet is a reliable tourist magnet when it comes to town, drawing unaccustomed crowds far and wide, and some visitors, suitably strafed and deafened, wind up at the symphony. This explains Bermuda shorts and flip flops in Saturday's audience and a tendency to applaud in the wrong places. I'm not sure it explains an ill-tempered dowager who shouted her disapproval of the music and had to be removed. Nor did anyone, official or otherwise, manage to decode bizarre noises repeatedly emanating from, well. somewhere....I get ahead of myself. It was an interesting evening!
Berkshire Review

Glimmerglass 2017: Opera in Angustiis: Commentaries for our Troubled Times in Stunning Glimmerglass Season Siege of Calais

The late Donizetti masterpiece, L'assedio di Calais (The Siege of Calais) is a rarity indeed, even in Europe. Four years after the first performance, l’assedio was not performed again until 1990.  One hundred and eighty-one years after its premiere in 1836, this Glimmerglass production marked the American premiere.  During its composition, Donizetti had struggled with it and bent operatic conventions to seek performances in Paris. Ultimately, the opera was a tactical failure and Donizetti wound up with two versions, with an unequal number of acts. In preparation for this production, Francesca Zambello and Joseph Colaneri worked on a new performing edition that tightened loose ends and yielded a satisfactory, if not compelling, conclusion.  Some ballet music was lost in the cuts, but dance (to curry favor with French opera goers) would be an awkward addition to the nobility and gravity of the plot. In the Zambello/Colaneri conclusion, the final exculpation of six sacrificial hostages was emotionally and musically heartrending.
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