Mendelssohn

Music

Sir András Schiff leads the San Francisco Orchestra in Bach and Mendelssohn

Let it never be said that an evening of Lutheran virtue makes for date night in San Francisco. Absent last Friday from our grey-haired audience huddling into its winter coats were the backless dresses and sculpture-worthy flashes of leg which usually cheer the frisky. Two gay men I passed in the crowd were no happier about it: "Bach only brings out the old men," sighed one ruefully. But there was a fascination for me in what turned out to be a solid, indeed old-fashioned evening of Victorian-style uplift. In particular, I was eager to encounter live Mendelssohn's Lobgesang Symphony-Cantata ("The Song of Praise"), sometimes called his Second Symphony. It was composed in 1840 to celebrate Gutenberg's invention of moveable type (ed.), but receives here its first San Francisco performance.

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!
New York Arts

Three Concerts at Camphill Ghent, two Past, one to Come

Off-season musical life is not as thin in the Hudson Valley as it is in the Berkshires, but, whatever the general situation, the Concerts at Camphill Ghent, founded and directed by pianist Gili Melamed-Lev, stand out for their exceptional quality, one month after another. As I have mentioned elsewhere, these concerts, which usually sell out weeks before the concert date, take place in the intimate performing arts hall of Camphill Ghent, a residential community for elders in Chatham, New York. This particular article will offer a preview of the upcoming March concert, which is actually based on an abbreviated version of the program the Lev-Evans Duo played at a house concert in Stockbridge last month, and reviews of two previous concerts at Camphill Ghent.
Music

Scriabin lives again at Carnegie Hall! With Mendelssohn, Debussy, Brahms, and Schumann. Riccardo Muti conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, with Yefim Bronfman

One can't help feeling mildly shocked when one realizes that the Chicago Symphony is now alone among the great American orchestras in employing one of the great senior conductors as Music Director. Michael Tilson Thomas in San Francisco is close to him in age, but nowhere near him in authority. Franz Welser-Möst has something like authority, but not the age, and one might say that his conviction in following his own lights has not quite developed into the kind of authority conductors like Muti and Chailly command.
Music

What is and what might have been: More Nelsons at the BSO, Chailly and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra

I couldn’t have been more eager to hear Riccardo Chailly and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra on their return visit to Boston, part of an American tour celebrating the 25th anniversary of the “Peaceful Revolution” that began in Leipzig in October 1989 and a month later led to the fall of the Berlin wall. Chailly continues to be one of most significant and enriching conductors of our time, and it was profoundly frustrating that, in January of 2012, heart problems prevented him from making his long overdue BSO debut (conducting, among other things, Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps). This cancellation also put him out of the running as a possible replacement for James Levine as BSO music director. There was no way the BSO would risk hiring another music director with health problems. And yet, apparently recovered, here he was in Boston.
Music

No matter how you slice it…Andris Nelsons’ BSO Salome, plus other Boston treats

I was part of the capacity crowd at Boston’s Symphony Hall (March 6) that rose to its collective feet to cheer BSO music director designate Andris Nelson’s first opera with his new orchestral family. Richard Strauss is one of his favorite composers, and at the press conference the day before he announced that among the ten relatively conservative programs he’s doing in his upcoming first season as music director, he’s scheduled two familiar Strauss tone poems, Don Quixote and Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life—“Not about myself,” he joked). The BSO’s only opera next season, one of its few daring choices of repertoire, will be Charles Dutoit leading the first BSO performance of Szymanowski’s King Roger, with Polish baritone Marius Kwiecień repeating his Paris and Santa Fe triumphs in the title role.
WP2Social Auto Publish Powered By : XYZScripts.com