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Rimsky Korsakov

HHA
Teatro San Carlo, Naples, Empty

Locke’s List for 2020: Major Discoveries and Pleasant Diversions in Operatic and Other Vocal Music (Plus a Ballet to a Scenario by Arthur Schnitzler)

January 1, 2021Ralph P. Locke

What a strange, scary, and remarkable year 2020 has been, in all our lives! The social isolation that I have carried out pretty consistently has led me to look to music even more than usual for solace, enlightenment, and pleasant distraction. I gather that many music lovers have traveled a somewhat similar path since mid-March. My penchant for opera, and for vocal music and for the theatre generally, has led me to get to know a number of recent CD releases, many of which I have reviewed for American Record Guide or for various online magazines.
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Music
Conrad Tao. Photo Ruiming Wang.

Summer Russians: The San Francisco Symphony
, Edwin Outwater, conductor
 Conrad Tao, piano

August 24, 2015Steven Kruger

There is a special feeling at Davies Hall in summer. The weather is balmy, if we are lucky. The sun is still up as the concert begins. But our hair is let down. Children are present, and young people dot the aisles in remarkable stages of undress. The air of eager informality is like a visit to the movies—minus the smell of popcorn. And, musically speaking, here we sometimes get the chance to hear romantic rarities we secretly love.
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Berkshire Review
Verdi's Un giorno di regno, ensemble.

Crowned: Opera Odyssey’s June Festival, plus Guerilla Opera and Commonwealth Lyric Theater, and OperaHub

July 1, 2014Lloyd Schwartz

For a city that hasn’t seemed very welcoming to opera, Boston has had a lot of opera going on lately. Since Opera Boston closed on January 1, 2012, there’s been only one major opera company left, the Boston Lyric. But last fall, Gil Rose, former music director of Opera Boston, returned as the head of an important new company, Odyssey Opera, leading a rare performance in concert of Wagner’s first opera, the epic Rienzi. It was a critical success, and now, at the intimate BU Theatre, Odyssey has let its other shoe drop with two programs of fully staged smaller-scale but equally unusual repertoire: Verdi’s second opera, Un giorno di regno (King for a Day), the first of his only two comedies and one of the biggest flops of his entire career; and a double bill of Mascagni’s even rarer “lyric scene,” Zanetto, last seen in Boston in 1902, when Mascagni himself brought it on an American tour (and was  thrown into the Charles Street jail for not paying his company), and Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s 1910 farce, Il segreto di Susanna (Susanna’s “secret” being her unladylike addiction to cigarettes).
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Music
Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos in 1959

A Visit to the “Southland”—Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos and the LA Philharmonic in Disney Hall

December 27, 2013Steven Kruger

It wasn't, I confess, the originality of the afternoon's program, which drew me to attend the Sunday concert recently at Disney Hall, but its likely mastery. I was in "The Southland" (as we say in California) in futile search of fahrenheit and friendly sands, only to encounter wet-suits, dogs at the beach and windswept desertion in the face of the same cold-snap that immobilized the East a few days later. But I warmed to the thought of seeing Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos perform again.
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Bard Music Festival
Albert Gleizes (1881–1953), Portrait of Igor Stravinsky (1914). Oil on canvas. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Bard Music Festival, 2013: Igor Stravinsky and his World, Part I

October 28, 2013Michael Miller

Every year, the Bard Summer Music Festival enjoys excellent attendance, including some, like Saint-Saëns, in 2012, that even surprised the organizers. I think it also came a something of a surprise that this year's Stravinsky Festival was a sell-out for most events, to the point that the lobby of Olin Hall was filled with long lines of nervous visitors, hoping to get their hands on a return. Why did Stravinsky, the forbidding dandy, who had no interest whatsoever in providing comfort for his audiences, turn out to be such a draw? Was it the popular film about his love life? Robert Craft's recent, highly dubious "outing" of him, which created a flurry in the newspapers? The hit play, Nikolai and the Others, at Lincoln Center? Or is it simply hip to like Stravinsky these days?
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Music

Yuri Temirkanov Conducts the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra with Nikolai Lugansky, Piano in Rachmaninoff and Rimsky-Korsakov

April 12, 2011Steven Kruger

recent San Francisco visit of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, grandly led by Yuri Temirkanov and featuring Nikolai Lugansky as piano soloist, is a fine example of why one should make a point of hearing orchestras on tour.

Present-day listeners are frequently tempted to overgeneralize about music in Russia, knowing only Valery Gergiev or some of the younger conductors currently recording in the UK. Gergiev's brand of intensity sometimes invites lurid cliches about Russian "barbaric splendor." Indeed, there have been Gergiev concerts where passion seemed to destroy luster and raw perspiration carried the day---an approach more bear than bearnaise. So it is enlightening to encounter in the St. Petersburg Philharmonic the continuation of a highly charged but more patrician attitude towards music-making. One recalls that Mravinsky and his "Leningrad Philharmonic" cast a grand Karajan-like shadow over the Russian-speaking musical world for forty years. Something of that special dignity remains. Indeed, an almost nineteenth-century manner.

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