The legendary cellist was born on 7 October 1955. The Strad takes a look at some moments of the cellist’s unparalleled career over the decades…
Filed under: music news, The Strad, Yo-Yo Ma
October 7, 2025 • 1:19 am Comments Off on Happy Birthday! Yo-Yo Ma at 70
Happy Birthday! Yo-Yo Ma at 70
September 11, 2025 • 1:04 am Comments Off on Teddy Abrams Named Artistic and Executive Director of Ojai Festival
Teddy Abrams Named Artistic and Executive Director of Ojai Festival
Big and exciting news from the Ojai Festival:
Ojai, CA – September 10, 2025) – Ojai Music Festival Board Chairman Jerry Eberhardt announced today the appointment of conductor/composer/pianist Teddy Abrams as Ojai’s next Artistic and Executive Director effective September 1, 2026, with his first Festival being the 81st Festival in June 2027. He will join the ranks of such distinguished predecessors as Ara Guzelimian, who concludes his tenure with the 2026 Festival, Thomas W. Morris, Ernest Fleischmann, and Lawrence Morton. Mr. Abrams’ collaboration with the Ojai Music Festival will be concurrent with his post as Music Director of the Louisville Orchestra….
Filed under: music news, Ojai Festival, Teddy Abrams
September 5, 2025 • 1:22 am 1
Salonen with the Parisians in Lucerne
Big news this week: just after Esa-Pekka Salonen wrapped up his Lucerne Festival visit with the Orchestre de Paris, it was announced that he has been named the ensemble’s Chief Conductor starting in 2027. Parallel to that, he’ll become the take up the new Creativity and Innovation Chair of the Philharmonie de Paris. Salonen’s collaboration with the orchestra in Lucerne offered a vivid taste of that future partnership in two very different programs last weekend.
In the first, Augustin Hadelich was the soloist in an account of the Brahms concerto notable for its shadowed lyricism and spacious pacing, illuminating the score’s darker hues. Hadelich played his own cadenza and his arrangement of a Carlos Gardel tango as a steam-vent of an encore following such intensity. If Salonen brought structural clarity to the Brahms, the suite from Prokofiev’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ that followed surged with dramatic sweep. The episodes seemed to unfold as part of an inexorable tragic arc rather than a set of contrasting miniatures.
His second evening with the Paris musicians revealed a touch more humor alongside the testosterone of ‘Don Juan’. But all that Straussian horn-iness set the stage for the much-anticipated world premiere of Salonen’s own Horn Concerto written for Berliner Philharmoniker principal Stefan Dohr. It’s a big piece, heroic in its way and abounding in the composer’s deep knowledge of the literature across music history, especially Mozart, Beethoven, and Bruckner (Salonen also trained as a horn player). He colorfully remarked that these moments from the musical past ‘appear and disappear like fish coming to the surface to catch an insect before diving to the depths of the sea again’.
The concerto teems with exposed solo passages that seem to test the limits of breath and control — not to mention imagination, indispensable to giving expressive shape to Salonen’s fertile ideas. Around the horn, the orchestra cast a kaleidoscope of refined colors. The concerto will travel widely in the coming months, so I hope to get a chance for more encounters.
Horn sounds resounded still again, sublimely, in the Sibelius Fifth. Salonen’s control of the art of transition, with subtly judged but dramatically thrilling accelerando, was a marvel. For all the monumentality of the closing chords, I fancied amid their awe an echo of mortality, like the trees being felled at the end of ‘The Cherry Orchard’. But the solace of Sibelius’s glorious Swan Theme circled in the mind’s ear as the swans on Lake Lucerne outside the KKL glided serenely by in serene silence.
Filed under: Esa-Pekka Salonen, Lucerne Festival, music news, Sibelius, classical, classical-music, music, orchestra, piano
June 25, 2025 • 9:25 am Comments Off on Happy Birthday to João Carlos Martins!
Happy Birthday to João Carlos Martins!
Happy 85th birthday to o Maestro, João Carlos Martins! Born on 25 June 1940 in São Paulo, Martins established himself as one of the most brilliant keyboard interpreters of Johann Ses=bastian Bach in the second half of the 20th century.
Yet his Bach legacy is just one component of an artistic journey marked by both acclaim and adversity. João Carlos Martins’s story is as much about resilience and reinvention as it is about musical brilliance. Following prodigious beginnings – he made his Carnegie Hall debut at age 20 – repeated injuries to his hands forced Martins to step away from the piano, just as he was reaching the height of his international career. But rather than retreat from music, he redirected his focus to conducting, bringing the same fervor and eloquence to the podium that once defined his playing.
Martins additionally became an enormously influential cultural force in Brazil. Through his Bachiana Foundation, he has brought classical music to thousands of young people, many from underserved communities, creating access where there was none. Alongside this work with the Fundação Bachiana, Martins has also been a champion of Latin American composers.
His initiatives have blended high artistic standards with social impact, forging a vision of music as both an expressive art and a tool for transformation. Under his leadership, the Bachiana Filarmônica SESI-SP has become one of Brazil’s most dynamic cultural foundations – a platform for emerging talent and a vehicle for national pride, performing everywhere from favelas to major concert halls.
Martins’s late-career return to the keyboard – made possible by specially adapted bionic gloves – has added an inspiring new chapter to an already remarkable artistic narrative. Following his moving farewell concert at Carnegie Hall last month, Martins continues to extend a career that has continually defied limitation as he devotes himself to a broad new initiative to improve music education across Brazil.
Feliz Aniversário, Maestro! Your artistry continues to resonate far beyond the concert hall.
An archive of JCM videos can be found here.
Filed under: Bach, Brazil, music news, classical-music, music, news, piano, rock
May 3, 2025 • 1:16 pm Comments Off on Rufus Wainwright’s “Dream Requiem” in Los Angeles
Rufus Wainwright’s “Dream Requiem” in Los Angeles
I’ve been a fan of Rufus Wainwright’s wonderful songwriting for decades, so it was a special pleasure to have the opportunity to write the program essay for the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s performance of his Dream Requiem – an epic project that is receiving its North American premiere on Sunday evening, 4 May. The amazing Grant Gershon conducts, with Liv Redpath as the soprano soloist and Jane Fonda as the narrator.
Rufus Wainwright and Jane Fonda in conversation
Filed under: Los Angeles Master Chorale, music news, requiem
March 14, 2025 • 7:16 pm Comments Off on RIP Sofia Gubaidulina (1931-2025)
RIP Sofia Gubaidulina (1931-2025)
“I am a religious Russian Orthodox person and I understand ‘religion’ in the literal meaning of the word, as ‘re-ligio’, that is to say the restoration of connections, the restoration of the ‘legato’ of life. There is no more serious task for music than this.” – Sofia Gubaidulina
The great Sofia Gubaidulina has died at the age of 93. She passed away on 13 March at her home in Appen, Germany.
From her publisher, Boosey & Hawkes: “Sofia Gubaidulina, the grande dame of new music, has passed away on 13 March 2025, aged 93, at her home in Appen, near Hamburg in Germany. She was considered the most important Russian composer of the present day and a person who drew inspiration from a deep faith. Her interest in the world, in people and in the spiritual touched everyone who met and worked with her. In her work, she always focussed on the elementary, on human existence and the transformative power of music.
She is like a ‘flying hermit’, said conductor Simon Rattle, because she is always “in orbit and only occasionally visits terra firma. Now and then she comes to us on the earth and brings us light and then goes back into her orbit.” Conductor Andris Nelsons has noted that “Sofia Gubaidulina’s music – its intellect and its profound spirituality – is deeply touching. It really gets under your skin”.
According to NPR: “In a 2017 interview with the BBVA Foundation, Gubaidulina talked about the power of music in sweeping terms. ‘The art of music is consistent with the task of expanding the higher dimension of our lives,’ she said. A deeply religious artist, she once described her writing process as speaking with God.” She also said: “The art of music is capable of touching and approaching mysteries and laws existing in the cosmos and in the world.”
Filed under: Gubaidulina, music news, classical-music, music, reviews, travel, writing
March 7, 2025 • 11:04 am Comments Off on Rediscovering French Composer Fernande Decruck
Rediscovering French Composer Fernande Decruck
Here’s my recent interview for The Strad with conductor Matthew Aubin on his mission to reclaim attention for Fernande Decruck’s music:
For decades, French composer Fernande Decruck (1896–1954) was known only for her Sonata in C-sharp for alto saxophone, a staple of the classical saxophone repertoire. Many of her compositions were left unpublished at her untimely death at the age of 57 and sank into oblivion.
Filed under: music news, recommended listening, The Strad
February 26, 2025 • 9:53 am Comments Off on “Canon for Racial Reconciliation”
“Canon for Racial Reconciliation”
This weekend brings another of my picks for the first few months of 2025: Cappella Romana presents the world premiere of the complete Canon for Racial Reconciliation, a collaboration between composers Isaac Cates and Nicholas Reeves that fuses the sound worlds of Orthodox and Gospel church music.
Cates and Reeves have set a remarkable poem in the form of an ancient Byzantine canon written by Dr. Carla Thomas, one of the leaders of the Fellowship of St. Moses the Black, whose mission is “to share the Orthodox Christian faith with African Americans and people of color.”
Combining two choirs – each coming from Orthodox and Gospel traditions, respectively – Canon also calls for violin, trumpet, guitar, piano, a Hammond B-3 organ, and pre-recorded sound samples of sermons and related material.
James Bash has written an excellent preview for Oregon.live here, which includes this observation from co-composer Nicholas Reeves: “This piece was not a response to anything specific that is happening at the moment. It touches on issues that have been part of America for a long, long time. There are no political positions in the piece. The Canon of Racial Reconciliation comes from a compassionate and reconciliatory perspective. It recognizes misdeeds and violence and justice and tries to find a way forward that moves everyone ahead. The goal is healing in America. We move ahead even when there is no forgiveness or justice present. The music is an expression of mutual and peaceful co-existence.”
Performances are Friday 28 February at 7.30pm at Town Hall in Seattle and Saturday 1 March at 7.30pm at First United Methodist Church in Portland. Go here for tickets or call 503-236-8202 (use the code CANON for a 20% discount in advance). There will be a conversation with the composers and conductors right before the performances (free with registration).
Filed under: Cappella Romana, music news, bible, classical-music, gospel music, music, orthodox music
February 10, 2025 • 7:39 pm Comments Off on Seattle Opera Announces 2025-26 Season
Seattle Opera Announces 2025-26 Season
Today Seattle Opera announced the lineup for the company’s first full season with General and Artistic Director James Robinson at the helm.
I’m especially pleased to see Gregory Spears’s Fellow Travelers – more timely than ever – among the three company premieres. Last summer’s Santa Fe Opera season included The Righteous, a collaboration between Spears and poet Tracey K. Smith, and the production knocked me out. Fellow Travelers is set during the McCarthy era and is based on the Thomas Mallon novel about the “Lavender Scare” that affected workers in the federal government.
Budget tightening obviously plays a big role here, but the rest of the season is quite a mixed bag: Seattle Opera’s first venture into Gilbert & Sullivan territory with The Pirates of Penzance; a Richard Strauss rarity, Daphne, but in concert format, which will star Heidi Stober as the mythic protagonist and with David Afkham conducting; and the perennial Carmen, which will star Sasha Cooke in her role debut (alternating with J’Nai Bridges in one of her signature parts). Another plus: Ludovic Morlot will conduct.
So we’re now done to just four mainstage productions, one of them in concert format, and no more season opener in August – when the Ring used to be the center of attention, so long ago.
Here’s the complete program:
Performance Information (see full cast lists at seattleopera.org)
The Pirates of Penzance
Music by Arthur Sullivan
Libretto by W.S. Gilbert
Conducted by David Charles Abell
Directed and Choreographed by Seán Curran
October 18, 19, 24, 26, 28, 29, November 1, 2025
McCaw Hall (321 Mercer St, Seattle, WA 98109)
seattleopera.org/pirates
Gay Apparel: A Holiday Show
December 12 & 13, 2025
The Opera Center (363 Mercer St, Seattle, WA 98109)
seattleopera.org/gayapparel
Daphne in Concert
Music by Richard Strauss
Libretto by Joseph Gregor
January 16 & 18, 2026
McCaw Hall (321 Mercer St, Seattle, WA 98109)
seattleopera.org/daphne
Fellow Travelers
Music by Gregory Spears
Libretto by Greg Pierce
Conducted by Patrick Summers
Directed by Kevin Newbury
February 21, 22, 25, 27, 28, & March 1, 2026
The Opera Center (363 Mercer St, Seattle, WA 98109)
seattleopera.org/fellowtravelers
Carmen
Music by George Bizet
Libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy
Conducted by Ludovic Morlot
Directed and Choreographed by Paul Curran
May 2, 3, 8, 9, 10, 13, 16, & 17, 2026
McCaw Hall (321 Mercer St, Seattle, WA 98109)
seattleopera.org/carmen
Filed under: music news, Seattle Opera, music, news, opera, seattle, travel
February 4, 2025 • 1:34 pm Comments Off on Mozart and the Fortepiano
Mozart and the Fortepiano
A week after its sold-out immersion in Winterreise with baritone Charles Robert Stephens (on Schubert’s birthday), Seattle Chamber Orchestra presents a program exploring the fortepiano – the kind of keyboard Mozart knew.
Mozart had to carve out his own path as a freelance artist in Vienna during the final decade of his career. He relied on his reputation as a celebrity virtuoso to cultivate a core audience, largely through his dazzlingly inventive series of piano concertos (as we call them), which he typically premiered in subscription concerts that doubled as crucial fundraising opportunities.
Conductor and pianist Lorenzo Marasso, SCO’s founder and music director, has curated a program around two of these concertos, which will be performed using a fortepiano: K. 449 in E-flat major and K. 488 in A major, with Tamara Friedman and Marasso as the soloists. He will also conduct SCO in Mozart’s Divertimento in D major, K133, and the great G minor Symphony, K. 550.
“A fortepiano is an early piano,” Marasso explains. “In principle, the word fortepiano can designate any piano dating from the invention of the instrument by Bartolomeo Cristofori in 1698 up to the early 19th century. Most typically, however, it is used to refer to the mid-18th- to early-19th-century Viennese instruments, for which composers of the Classical era, especially Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, wrote their piano music.”
The concertos will be performed on a replica of just such a Viennese fortepiano, which was built by Rod Regier and is borrowed from the collection of historical keyboards of Prof. George Bozarth and Tamara Friedman.
The concert will be held on 7 February 2025 at Plymouth United Church of Christ in downtown Seattle (1217 6th Ave). A pre-concert talk will take place at 7:15pm; the performance begins at 8pm. Admission includes the pre-concert talk and the performance, accompanied by drinks and appetizers. Tickets here.
PROGRAM:
Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART
Divertimento in D major K133
Piano Concerto No. 14 in E-flat major K449
Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major K488
Symphony No. 40 in G minor K550
Tamara Friedman fortepiano
Lorenzo Marasso fortepiano & conductor
Seattle Chamber Orchestra
Seattle Chamber Orchestra provides this bio:
The newly formed SCO is rooted in our cherished Pacific Northwest’s casual and open culture and brings together the region’s top instrumentalists to create an all-sensory experience of music where you are invited to be part of the experience rather than merely witnessing it. Founded in 2021, the Seattle Chamber Orchestra seeks to bring music lovers tantalizing combinations of the traditional and contemporary repertoire, performed by world-class professional musicians. Brought to life through thoughtful programming that educates as much as it inspires, SCO seeks to reinvigorate live classical music by providing opportunities for musicians and audiences to explore traditional and new music and challenge established boundaries.
Filed under: Mozart, music news, piano, Seattle Chamber Orchestra, classical, classical-music, Mozart, music, piano
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 