December 6, 2016 • 8:35 am Comments Off on Elgar’s Dream a Transformative Experience at Seattle Symphony
Edward Gardner © Benjamin Ealovega
At this late date, it’s surprising how relatively little-known The Dream of Gerontiusremains among American audiences. Edward Elgar’s masterpiece – even if not the composer’s own favourite among his great oratorio trilogy – contains all the goods to move a concert audience to its core. ..
Filed under: choral music, Edward Elgar, review, Seattle Symphony
December 1, 2016 • 6:09 am Comments Off on Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin: A Sea Apart
Excited about tonight’s opening: historic moment for the Met.
On Friday, 1 December 2016, the Metropolitan Opera will premiere its new production of Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin. It will mark the first time since 1903 that the company will have presented an opera by a woman composer.
Here’s my essay for the Met’s Season book on this stunning creation by Kaija Saariaho:
Since its world premiere at the Salzburg Festival in 2000, L’Amour de Loin has earned a place among the most acclaimed stage works of the 21st century. The opera won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Musical Composition in 2003 and has been performed in Paris, London, Santa Fe, Helsinki, Aspen, Darmstadt, and elsewhere. Yet it took years before Kaija Saariaho became convinced that opera could be a viable medium for what she wanted to express as a composer.
Filed under: Uncategorized
November 25, 2016 • 12:00 am Comments Off on Learning To Listen: Fallujah Brings the Iraq War to the Opera Stage
(c) Sarah Shatz/New York City Opera
The tag “CNN opera” was always a misleading way to refer to operas grappling with current events, but it’s downright insulting when it comes to a work like Fallujah, the chamber opera by the Canadian composer Tobin Stokes and the Iraqi-American librettist Heather Raffo that just received its East Coast première in a co-production by New York City Opera and Long Beach Opera.
Filed under: new music, New York City Opera, review
November 24, 2016 • 12:19 am Comments Off on Charles Ives: Thanksgiving and Forefathers’ Day
Filed under: American music, Charles Ives, San Francisco Symphony
November 22, 2016 • 7:20 am Comments Off on Jaap van Zweden Takes the New York Philharmonic for a Test Drive
Last week Jaap van Zweden conducted the New York Philharmonic in their first concert together since he was named Alan Gilbert’s successor as music director (starting in the 2018-19 season).
The program was a rich one: the Prelude to Wagner’s Lohengrin, Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, and the New York premiere of a brand-new viola concerto, Unearth, Release, by the highly talented young LA-based composer Julia Adolphe.
My review for Musical America has now been posted (behind the usual paywall):
NEW YORK—Four-and-a-half years after making his New York Philharmonic debut, Jaap van Zweden ascended the podium on Thursday for his first concert with the orchestra since being appointed …
Filed under: Musical America, new music, New York Philharmonic, review, Tchaikovsky, Wagner
November 19, 2016 • 12:51 am 2
Composer Jonathan Dove (Photo by Max Barstow)
My article on Jonathan Dove’s opera Flight for The Juilliard Journal:
Jonathan Dove’s three-act opera Flight has enjoyed phenomenal success since its 1998 premiere, as a commission by the Glyndebourne Festival. Opera Theatre of St. Louis staged the first U.S. production, in 2003, and to date Flight has been performed more than 85 times around the world in productions for mainstage opera companies and music schools alike. This month, Juilliard Opera opens its season with a new production of this comedy for 10 singers and large orchestra.
November 18, 2016 • 10:51 am Comments Off on Lucerne’s Piano Festival
The third and final installment of Lucerne Festival’s 2016 programming is the Piano Festival. It starts on Saturday (19 November), with Grigory Sokolov in a Mozart-Schumann recital. And he’s playing one of the pianistic holy of holies, Schumann’s Op. 17.
Filed under: Lucerne Festival, piano, Schumann, Uncategorized
November 17, 2016 • 12:21 am Comments Off on Listening to Julia Adolphe
Tonight brings the New York Philharmonic’s world premiere of Julia Adolphe’s Viola Concerto for Cynthia Phelps, titled Unearth, Release — along with a bit of Wagner and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4, with Jaap van Zweden conducting.
Filed under: new music, New York Philharmonic, Uncategorized
November 12, 2016 • 9:48 am Comments Off on Congratulations to Philip Kennicott
Philip Kennicott
As a respite from the election nightmare, some good news: the 2016 ASCAP Virgil Thomson Award for Music Criticism (Concert Music category) has gone to the brilliant Philip Kennicott for his reflections on the Met’s Cavalleria Rusticana/I Pagliacci double bill for Opera News, titled “Suffering the Truth.”
It’s so satisfying to see a genuinely first-rate writer getting the honor he deserves. In 2013 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism. Kennicott’s eloquent writing is consistently original, stimulating, and richly insightful. Enjoy this prize-winning piece from one of our very finest critics:
It was in the fifth or sixth grade, in the class of a teacher I remember for only two things: he was portly, and his pants were too bright. Everything else is a blur, except for one afternoon when he decided his pupils needed to know something about musical theater, so he brought a stack of records to class and proceeded to play his favorite bits. Among them were snatches of Hello, Dolly!, The Music Man and Mame, and — for reasons I can’t quite figure out — Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci.
Filed under: cultural criticism, music news
Arts & Culture Stories from NPR
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 