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Saint-Saëns

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Pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet performs the U.S. premiere of Aaron Zigman’s Tango Manos Piano Concerto with the San Francisco Symphony and Fabien Gabel conducting on February 14 at Davies Symphony Hall. Photo Kristen Loken.

Fabien Gabel conducts the San Francisco Symphony in Dukas, Zigman, and Saint-Saëns, with Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Piano, and Jonathan Dimmock, Organ

February 26, 2020Steven Kruger

Last weekend the San Francisco Symphony, surely unbeknownst, gave me a Valentine's Day card masquerading as a pair of tickets! I don't honestly recall a concert in recent years I've enjoyed more than this one. I've known and loved Paul Dukas' ballet score La Peri for more than fifty years without ever hearing it live, and as a dedicated Francophile in music, I am always delighted to hear again Camille Saint-Saëns' iconic and fascinatingly structured Organ Symphony. Add to this the fact that I grew up in the wilds of Latin America and learned to tango just about when couples abandoned cutting a rug with each other on the dance floor in favor of wriggling in place, and you can imagine how a piano concerto based on Tango would evoke a special warmth and affection in someone like me. So I am writing more as a fan than as a critic this time.
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Music
Paul Jacobs

The Great French Organ Tradition: Three Concerts on Three Organs by Paul Jacobs

September 9, 2019The Editor

Organist Paul Jacobs, chair of Juilliard’s organ department, will perform a three-recital series in September 2019 featuring a program of works drawn from throughout the great French organ tradition. Mr. Jacobs stands out as among the organists of today for his interpretative intellect, virtuosity, and musicological learning. He opens the series performing on the Holtkamp organ in Juilliard’s Paul Hall on Tuesday, September 10, 2019, at 7:30pm. The series continues on the 1933 Aeolian-Skinner “Opus 891” at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin on Tuesday, September 17, 2019, at 7:30pm, and concludes on St. Ignatius Loyola’s 1993 Mander Organ on Tuesday, September 24, 2019, at 7:30pm.
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Opera
Paesiello’s La grotta di Trofonio, from 2016 Valle d’Itria Festival

A Flood of Unfamiliar Operas by Rossini, Saint-Saëns, and Others, Now on CD

March 1, 2018Ralph P. Locke

Over the past year or so (2017), an unusually large number of fascinating and rarely performed operas were made available, mostly for the first time ever, on CD. NewYorkArts/Berkshire Review for the Arts has asked me to share some of my delighted discoveries from this flood of new arrivals, as well as—in separate articles—my (rather lengthy and detailed!) reviews of two contrasting operas that seem to me particularly worthy of discovery:
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Music
Yan Pascal Tortelier

Yan Pascal Tortelier leads the San Francisco Symphony in a French Program: Bizet, Ravel, and Saint-Saëns, with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, piano, and Jonathan Dimmock, organ

November 28, 2015Steven Kruger

Yan Pascal Tortelier was levitating with exuberance last Friday. Every good conductor shows passion, of course, even those untempted by choreography. But audiences love the ones who take to the air and defy gravity—most famously Leonard Bernstein, who did so wildly and erotically—but also the occasional anomaly. I once witnessed long-gone Swedish conductor Sixten Ehrling, famously reserved, conduct Respighi's Roman Festivals in his seventies, leaping about the Carnegie Hall stage like a red devil from Hades. Only the trident was missing.
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Berkshire Review
Cellist Gautier Capucon, BSO principal violist Steven Ansell, and Andris Nelsons take their bows following their performance of Strauss's Don Quixote. Photo Michael Blanchard.

Andris Nelsons in Boston…with Two Superb Concerts under the BSO’s New Assistant Conductor, Ken-David Masur, and an Appreciation of James Levine

February 15, 2015Charles Warren

Andris Nelsons has garnered a lot of attention during his first season as Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra—much coverage in the local and even national press; receptions for the public and an exhibition with a talking hologram at Symphony Hall; placards on buses around Boston and in the subway. He threw out a ball for the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park. The BSO organization wants him talked about by the man and woman on the street—especially the younger set. It remains to be seen whether a new younger audience will be drawn to the BSO. Eventually, it’s the music that will matter, not publicity.
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