The Dessoff Choirs’ Messiah Sing, 2017, Malcolm J. Merriweather, Music Director, Conducting

Music

The Dessoff Choirs’ Messiah Sing, 2017, Malcolm J. Merriweather, Music Director, Conducting

December 30, 2016Mari S. Gold

For me, the holiday season is officially here when I sing the Messiah, George Frederic Handel's oratorio composed in 1741 that has become one of the most performed works in Western choral music. This year I was fortunate enough to join the Dessoff Choirs under the direction of Malcolm J. Merriweather, Musical Director. Some of the group that assembled at Union Theological Seminary regularly sing with Dessoff; others, like me, were rank amateurs whose voices have darkened over the years but whose enthusiasm remains robust. It doesn't matter in the least and there are enough strong voices to mask any missed notes from people like me.

Music

The Triumph of Youth: Juilliard415 at Tully Hall under Nicholas McGegan

April 22, 2011Larry Wallach

Juilliard415 at Tully Hall
Saturday November 20, 2010

Carl Heinrich Graun, Overture to Cleopatra e Cesare
Antonio Vivaldi, Concerto for Two Flutes in C Major, RV 533
George Frideric Handel, Cantata a tre Clori, Tirsi e Fileno

Nicholas McGegan, conductor…

New York Arts in Australia

Handel’s Partenope in Sydney

March 25, 2011Andrew Miller

Though perhaps not one of Handel's finest operas, Mr Alden's production of Partenope plays up its farcical tendencies past the point of ridiculousness and vulgarity and never really climbs out of the dishwater. A farce, even the silliest one, is still emotional, in fact it depends on emotions, however simple, to work, but it becomes cold when played as a series of jokes without wit. In addition, for some cheap intellectualism, Mr Alden imposes references to Man Ray's surrealist photography, but forced without honest reason, onto an opera which doesn't even have any interest in being surreal, they become clunky and arbitrary.

Music

Purcell and Handel with Andreas Scholl & Co.

March 21, 2011Andrew Miller

Most seem to agree musical historicism can go too far: imagine a Plymouth Plantation-style re-enactment of a concert of Baroque music with the audience coming and going, eating picnics in the gods, a musician wearing a modern watch dismissed as a "farb." Luckily most musical historicists are more practical and flexible. For this concert the hall lights stayed up, which is a nice touch, even if electrics are not as pretty as the candle-lit halls of days past. Unfortunately, and I assume unintended by the musicians, the audience did come and go in between the first several songs, which not only rudely made the musicians wait but disrupted the flow of the program, and one woman, having missed three or four songs, came clumping down the wood-floored aisle in high-heels making an incredible noise. More cheerfully, Mr Scholl had the audience join in on the refrain of Purcell's Man is for the Woman Made, which, according to Mr Scholl, is what Purcell intended when he originally composed it, for light relief in the theatre. And it did provide some short refreshing relief among the quite serious music in this program.

Dance

It’s Twilight Time With the Australian Ballet

November 19, 2010Andrew Miller

The Australian Ballet presents three short recent ballets which would seem at the surface to have nothing in common. In At the Edge of Night, first performed in 1997, but last performed 11 years ago, Stephen Baynes sets an impressionist ballet to seven preludes by Rachmaninov. The choreography, set design and costumes share the sensibility of the music, rolling subtly between nostalgia, longing, pining, contemplation, mild remorse, occasionally melancholy, ambivalence, poignant joy and other emotions only the piano can give a name. The brand new ballet, Halcyon by Tim Harbour, sets the Greek myth of Halcyon and Ceyx to dance with original music by Gerard Brophy. It is a particularly relevant myth about love oppressed by religion. The last ballet is Molto Vivace again by Stephen Baynes, first performed in 2003, but completely different in tone. It sets a light-hearted rococo comedy to Handel. All three are liminal, either touching, delving or diving into where phases change. We meet frontiers either as precise as the sea's surface, or as blurred as half conscious memories, or as completely black and mysterious as that between life and death and the other.