Search Results: Tully Scope
Between a Barn and Bayreuth: Francesca Zambello discusses her plans for Glimmerglass.
A Season Prélude, Millbrook, New York, April 10, 2011 Songs by Georges Bizet and Irving Berlin Lauren Snouffer, Soprano Eric Schnobrick, Piano
Francesca Zambello’s first season as Artistic Director of Glimmerglass will unfold very soon. Indeed, much in Cooperstown …
The Greatness of Reger—as Revealed by Paul Jacobs, Organist, at Juilliard
The new season began for me with a recital which was exemplary in every way. The music-making was on the highest level, and the program was was astutely chosen for a clearly defined purpose with which no music-lover could take exception. Paul Jacobs made in absolutely clear in his rather extensive, but never tedious addresses to the audience that he had two missions in mind: 1. to bring the organ recital back into mainstream concert-going 2. to promote the music of a great composer who is neglected by performing musicians and audiences alike. The organist's jocularity only made his passionate belief in these causes all the more poignant.
Handel’s Aci Galatea e Polifemo by Le concert d’Astrée
After the Boston Early Music Festival's magnificent production of Handel's first opera Almira, certainly a youthful work, from before he left for Italy, but such a great one, it is fascinating to hear another of his early dramatic works from a little later. He wrote Aci, Galatea e Polifemo as a cantata or serenata for a neapolitan royal wedding in 1708 (a year after his first cantata Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno and in the same year as his first oratorio La Resurrezione), and it feels to me very far to the opera end of the spectrum.
BEMF 2013: Review: Feeling the Elephant’s Ear
No one can review the Boston Early Music Festival. Critics must select what time, physical energy and mental attention allow from the one hundred and forty plus musical events, exhibition offerings, lectures, etc, that are encompassed by the official festival and its very prolific offspring on the “fringe,” whose events are included in the official program book. (Schlepping the 300 + page book to events gets to be another physical challenge.) This assessment of the scope, size, and character of the event is based on random selection and personal bias. As a keyboard player, I favored keyboard events to the point of taking in a series of concerts rather than running from one venue another. In a few cases, I wanted to see performances by people I know. I also seem to have listened to a lot of Bach. From this random sampling, I hope to convey something of the range of performers’ skills, repertory, ideas, and innovations attached to the concept of “Early Music” in this year’s festival. But this report is only the elephant’s ear; others will have to deal with the rest of the creature’s anatomy.
Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra and Choir, Ton Koopman, Conductor, in Bach’s Magnificat and Two Leipzig Cantatas
Last September I attended a remarkable performance of Bach's B Minor Mass at Emmanuel Church in Boston tonk under their admirable new Music Director, Ryan Turner, who is a singer and came to Emmanuel Music as a member of the chorus. By working his singers and instrumentalists into a deep literal and spiritual understanding of the score and giving them a great deal of expressive freedom, he revealed the spirit of the Mass in the most direct and moving way. In it, Bach plotted his course toward the happy state of the faithful Christian, who is blessed with some intimation or perhaps experience of the Kingdom of Heaven. On March 15 in Alice Tully Hall I shared in an equally life-affirming experience in a concert which explored other joyful aspects of Bach's church music. While the approach of Ton Koopman and his Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra was more historically conscious and intellectually distanced, the spirit of the music and its liturgical message came across no less vividly. It was in fact a joy in itself to hear some of Bach's greatest music played and sung with such accuracy, sureness, and understanding.
Dudamel and the LA Philharmonic at Davies Hall in San Francisco: Adams, Chapela, and Prokofiev…Dudamania lives!
Once upon a time, not too long ago, listeners might have resisted accepting on credit the notion of a conductor performing new music charismatically. For many decades, full-house audiences (at those moments desperately wishing themselves sparse) tended to squirm patiently through modern works, waiting for ever more elusive harmony or so much as a symphonic phrase, the experience more to be withstood than understood. Dodecaphonic compositions, in particular, constituted toll-booths on the musical freeway: to be bought off as taxation, passed-through and, if lucky, forgotten. Certainly not to be loved.
Lully and Quinault’s Atys: Christie and Villégier’s Historic Production of Les Arts Florissants Revived at BAM for its 150th Anniversary
The Brooklyn Academy of Music, chose to open their 150th anniversary celebrations with a more recent, but no less historically significant commemoration, and typical of the innovative, constantly exciting work BAM has been doing since the 1960s. This was nothing less than a “recreation,” as the program calls it, of Jean-Marie Villégier’s watershed production of Lully’s Atys, with music by Les Arts Florissants, conducted by William Christie. This production, organized by the Paris Opera to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Lully’s death, went through 70 performances between its premiere in December 1986 in Prato, and its second revival in 1992, closing finally at BAM after its second run there.
