September 10, 2022 • 8:18 am Comments Off on Album Review: Sarah Plum’s Personal Noise
My latest review for Gramophone is of violinist/violist Sarah Plum‘s new release, Personal Noise:
A slim discography barely hints at violinist Sarah Plum’s prolific career as a ‘new music specialist’ but confirms her engagingly adventurous sensibility….
Filed under: CD review, Gramophone, violinists
September 9, 2022 • 8:21 am 1
Antony and Cleopatra, the latest opera by John Adams, is receiving its world premiere this month at San Francisco Opera. Tomorrow is opening night and the start of the company’s centennial season.
Here’s a preview I wrote for Opera Now‘s September issue, in which the composer discusses his decision to set Shakespeare’s love tragedy.
[San Francisco Opera will livestream the performance of 18 September at 2pm PST. Tickets are $27.50.
PLEASE PURCHASE YOUR LIVESTREAM TICKET AT LEAST 60 MINUTES PRIOR TO CURTAIN.]
Filed under: John Adams, San Francisco Opera, Shakespeare
September 6, 2022 • 11:02 am Comments Off on RIP Lars Vogt (1970-2022)
Deeply saddened to learn that Lars Vogt has died. The wonderful, deeply humane pianist and conductor had been battling cancer over the past few years — a situation he movingly described in this 2021 interview: “In the last several years, I often had the feeling that time was passing insanely fast. It was so easy to imagine a ‘whoosh,’ and suddenly I’m 80, and the day is done. It’s something that I think a lot of us experience, an accelerando where time keeps flying by more quickly. Before the illness, I was often depressed, even if it was just for a day or two. I’d stay in bed and think: ‘Oh God, I’m so old.’ Funnily, because of the illness that’s completely disappeared. I’m rarely so defeated. More often I’m utterly happy.”
In his most recently released recording, which came out in March, Vogt combined his personalities as pianist and conductor to give sensitive accounts, together with his Orchestre chambre de Paris, of the Mendelssohn piano concertos. Here the artist shares his insights on Mendelssohn, whose music he likens to “fresh, clean water — completely refreshing in every way”:
Filed under: Mendelssohn, music news, pianists
September 3, 2022 • 5:24 pm Comments Off on Music on the Strait: 2022 Finale Featuring Paul Chihara Commission
Tonight brings the finale concert of this summer’s Music on the Strait Festival. It features the world premiere of Paul Chihara‘s, Duo for Violin and Viola, which was commissioned by Music on the Strait. The concert begins at 7pm PST, with a pre-concert interview with the composer by Lisa Bergman starting at 6.15.
Long based in New York City, Chihara was born in Seattle in 1938 and spent three formative childhood years in the notorious internment camp in Minidoka, Idaho, where his family was among the 120,000 Japanese Americans forcibly “relocated” at ten camps throughout the US during the Second World War.
Regarding that experience, Chihara remarked in a recent interview with Diane Urbani de la Paz: “I don’t know how my parents emotionally survived this … we could have come back and found nothing.”
A professor of music at New York University, Chihara has composed a vast body of work, ranging from symphonies, concertos, ballets, and choral music to chamber pieces; he has also written scores for more than 90 films and TV series (Prince of the City, The Morning After, Crossing Delancey, China Beach, and Noble House, among many others).
Music on the Strait’s Artistic Directors Richard O’Neill and James Garlick will give the inaugural performance of the new duo Chihara wrote especially for them. The composer explained to de la Paz that the new duo is a “fantasy” on a song he had written 40 years ago for his violinist wife, “Born to Be Together.” Also on the program is Felix Mendelssohn’s D minor Piano Trio and Edward Elgar’s Piano Quintet in A minor.
Although it is sold out, the concert will be live-streamed at the link above.
Musicians:
Kyu-Young Kim, violin
James Garlick, violin
Sæunn Thorsteinsdóttir, cello
Richard O’Neill, viola
George Li, piano
Paul Chihara Duo for Violin and Viola WORLD PREMIERE (2022)
Felix Mendelssohn Piano Trio No 1 in D minor, Op 49 (1839)
INTERMISSION
Edward Elgar Piano Quartet in A minor, Op 84 (1918)
Filed under: commissions, music news, Music on the Strait
September 1, 2022 • 3:20 pm Comments Off on In Pastoral Vastness, Grand Art Harmonizes With Music’s Intimacy at Tippet Rise
Here’s my report on Tippet Rise Art Center and its opening weekend for the 2022 season, which I wrote for Classical Voice North America:
FISHTAIL, Mont. — Set amid endlessly rolling hills, mesas, and grasslands that are framed by rugged mountains and the vast Montana sky, Tippet Rise Art Center beckons with a unique intersection of pristine nature and interdisciplinary artistic adventure. The surrounding landscape inevitably injects itself into each musical experience, while looming sculptural shapes retune the sounds of wind and distant thunder. The metaphors proliferate so abundantly here that you need to take care not to step on them — to adapt Brahms’ famous observation about a favorite summer idyll that stimulated his creativity…
Filed under: Classical Voice North America, commissions, Reena Esmail, Schumann, Tippet Rise
Arts & Culture Stories from NPR
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 