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
November 11, 2016 • 3:12 am Comments Off on RIP Leonard Cohen (1934-2016)
The losses continue mercilessly.
From the New York Times obituary:
Mr. Cohen was an unlikely and reluctant pop star, if in fact he ever was one. He was 33 when his first record was released in 1967. He sang in an increasingly gravelly baritone. He played simple chords on acoustic guitar or a cheap keyboard. And he maintained a private, sometime ascetic image at odds with the Dionysian excesses associated with rock ’n’ roll.
[…]
“The changeless is what he’s been about since the beginning,” the writer Pico Iyer argued in the liner notes for the anthology “The Essential Leonard Cohen.” “Some of the other great pilgrims of song pass through philosophies and selves as if through the stations of the cross. With Cohen, one feels he knew who he was and where he was going from the beginning, and only digs deeper, deeper, deeper.”
Filed under: music news, obituary
November 10, 2016 • 3:11 am Comments Off on Tim Munro’s Recounting
It’s been hard to fight the despair of the last few days. But we have to move on and focus on our shared humanity. The work of artists is more essential than ever. If you’re in New York, tonight flutist Tim Munro (formerly of eighth blackbird) makes his solo concert debut there in a fascinating program at the Miller Theatre. Here’s my introduction from the program book:
Thresholds and Transitions: Tim Munro’s New York Solo Debut
If there’s one thing you might safely expect from a Tim Munro concert, it’s not merely that it will contain the unexpected, but that the unexpected will hold centerstage. Munro (b. 1978) has pointedly not organized a menu of greatest hits replete with virtuoso pablum for his New York solo debut. Casting aside the standard showcases of silver-toned sweetness, he presents a program entirely of living composers (including two world premieres) who aid and abet Munro’s fascination with the theatrical and performative dimensions of his instrument.
If the avant-garde became known for its preoccupation with “extended-playing” techniques, Munro updates the experimental impulse for the 21st century with a bold vision of what it means to play the flute.
Filed under: new music
November 5, 2016 • 10:53 am Comments Off on A Primer in the Romantic Spirit from Seattle Symphony
Sergey Khachatryan. Image courtesy of Seattle Symphony.
My review of this weekend’s Seattle Symphony program with Ludovic Morlot and violinist Sergey Khachatryan is now live on Vanguard Seattle:
The Seattle Symphony Orchestra (SSO)’s sixth season with Music Director Ludovic Morlot has so far included a pair of electrifying programs that paired world premiere commissions by composers of today with Beethoven classics—the latter part of an ongoing two-year cycle of the composer’s complete symphonies and piano concertos.
Filed under: Berlioz, Ludovic Morlot, review, Seattle Symphony, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Vanguard Seattle
November 1, 2016 • 12:10 am Comments Off on Dudamel and LA Philharmonic on Tour with Mahler’s Ninth
Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic will perform Mahler’s Ninth Symphony at Benaroya Hall. (VERN EVANS PHOTO)
The charismatic conductor makes his first-ever Seattle stop with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for a one-night performance of Mahler’s profoundly moving Ninth Symphony.
Filed under: Gustavo Dudamel, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Mahler, Seattle Times
October 28, 2016 • 10:43 am Comments Off on A Pair of Striking Debuts at Seattle Symphony
Polish soprano/composer Agata Zubel
Along with unveiling a world premiere by composer Agata Zubel, the Seattle Symphony continued its ongoing Beethoven cycle with a rhapsodic contribution by soloist Inon Barnatan at the keyboard.
Filed under: Beethoven, new music, review, Seattle Symphony
October 25, 2016 • 8:01 pm Comments Off on Bob Dylan’s Nobel Silence
I’ve been waiting to see Bob Dylan’s own response to being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but as of today, there’s reportedly been only a stunning silence from the artist.
According to Johan Sennero’s report , Dylan “must give a lecture on a subject ‘relevant to the work for which the prize has been awarded’ no later than 6 months after Dec. 10, the anniversary of dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel’s death.”
If Dylan doesn’t deliver the relevant lecture (or “even a concert”) within that time frame, he’ll forfeit the $900,000 prize –though he’ll remain immortalized as 2016’s laureate.
Sennero adds: “Over the years, only six laureates has declined the prize. One of them was French existentialist author Jean-Paul Sartre in 1964. After Sartre fell on hard times a few years later his lawyer wrote the Nobel foundation asking them to send Sartre the money. They refused.”
Filed under: Bob Dylan
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