October 29, 2017 • 5:44 pm Comments Off on Berlioz Festival Coming Up at Seattle Symphony
My story on Ludovic Morlot, Seattle Symphony, and Berlioz immersion in the Seattle Times:
Ludovic Morlot’s connection to Hector Berlioz goes deep. When he was 12, his parents moved to a house just a few miles from La Côte-Saint-André, the composer’s native village in the southeastern corner of France.
Filed under: Berlioz, Ludovic Morlot, Seattle Symphony, Seattle Times
October 27, 2017 • 5:51 am Comments Off on Contemplating End Times with the Emerson Quartet
Emerson String Quartet Photo by Lisa Marie Mazzucco
My review of the Emerson Quartet’s performance for the White Light Festival at Lincoln Center for Musical America (paywall):
NEW YORK—“Conclusions are the weak point of most authors,” George Eliot famously declared, “but some of the fault lies in the very nature of a conclusion, which is at best a negation.” That may hold true for fiction, but composers glory in the powerful statements they can make when a piece approaches the double bar line. And, in the case of certain composers, music written when their own lives are nearing the end possesses a special mystique.
Filed under: Beethoven, Emerson String Quartet, Musical America, review, Shostakovich
October 26, 2017 • 5:13 am Comments Off on Layla and Majnun
Mark Morris and his Dance Group are now giving Layla and Majnun its New York premiere at the White Light Festival. I interviewed Morris for this Seattle Times preview when they performed it last year in Seattle:
Filed under: dance, Mark Morris
October 22, 2017 • 1:12 pm Comments Off on Musical America New Artist of the Month: Seth Parker Woods
This afternoon Seth Parker Woods makes his debut at the acclaimed Phillips Collection Sunday concerts series.
Musical America is featuring cellist Seth Parker Woods as New Artist of the Month for October. My profile here.
Filed under: Uncategorized
October 18, 2017 • 12:25 pm Comments Off on Angel in America
My essay for the Metropolitan Opera on Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel. The Met’s production opens next week and will be the North American premiere:
Not every composer has a knack for finding operatic potential in unlikely sources. But over the past two decades, Thomas Adès has followed his dramaturgical instinct to some of the most spectacular successes in contemporary opera…
Filed under: Metropolitan Opera, new opera, Thomas Adès
October 16, 2017 • 8:17 am Comments Off on Gidon Kremer with Seattle Symphony
Gidon Kremer; © Paolo Pellegrin
My review of Gidon Kremer’s visit with Seattle Symphony:
It’s entirely characteristic of Gidon Kremer to choose a discovery piece rather than a surefire crowd-pleaser for what was a rare appearance in Seattle…
Filed under: Gidon Kremer, Ludovic Morlot, Mendelssohn, review, Schumann, Seattle Symphony
October 15, 2017 • 7:30 am Comments Off on Dmitry Sinkovsky’s Vivaldi Project
Dmitry Sinkovsky (Photo credit: Marco Borggreve)
Casting a spell over your audience as a violin virtuoso is remarkable enough. But some musicians are real overachievers.
Filed under: Seattle Symphony, Seattle Times, Uncategorized, Vivaldi
October 13, 2017 • 2:26 pm Comments Off on Sibelius at the Piano
“For one thing — and, given the era, it was no small achievement — Sibelius never wrote against the grain of the keyboard. At its best, his style partook of that spare, bleak, motivically stingy counterpoint that nobody south of the Baltic ever seems to write.” –Glenn Gould
Arts & Culture Stories from NPR
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 