Filed under: photography
November 8, 2014 • 11:03 am Comments Off on Sublime Salonen from the Seattle Symphony and Jennifer Koh
Sublime Salonen from the Seattle Symphony and Jennifer Koh
Jennifer Koh; © Juergen Frank
My latest review:
It’s not unusual for Ludovic Morlot to offer a spirited brief introduction to a particular piece. But at the top of last night’s Seattle Symphony concert, the maestro was eager to elucidate a rationale threading together the motley menu of Samuel Barber, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and a Tchaikovsky warhorse: essentially, the proposition that all three works represented personal responses to periods of challenge or even crisis.
Filed under: new music, review, Seattle Symphony, Tchaikovsky
November 7, 2014 • 1:39 pm Comments Off on Transfiguring the Night: Music of Remembrance
Transfiguring the Night: Music of Remembrance
Rehearsal photos by Leo V Santiago photography.
My preview of the upcoming world premiere by choreographer Donald Byrd for Music of Remembrance:
The event that Music of Remembrance (MOR) will commemorate at this Sunday’s fall concert at Benaroya Hall on Sunday, November 9, is a grim one: the 76th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass” during which the Nazis fomented a wave of violent pogroms targeting Jews across Germany and the recently annexed Austria and Sudetenland. But MOR’s focus has always been on the triumphant creativity of the human spirit that defies oppression and hatred — against the most terrifying odds.
Launching its 17th season with this Benaroya concert, the organization remembers the work of composers who were silenced by the Holocaust not only by presenting their music but through a vigorous commissioning program showcasing artists of the present. The result has been to build what founder and artistic director Mina Miller calls “ a living bridge between Holocaust artists and artists today.”
The lineup here is especially attractive, featuring the world premiere of Seattle-based choreographer extraordinaire Donald Byrd’s new dances created for Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (“Transfigured Night”).
November 4, 2014 • 12:01 am Comments Off on A Glimpse of the Full Monte(verdi)
A Glimpse of the Full Monte(verdi)
Claudio Monteverdi was nearly an exact contemporary of Shakespeare, but his lifespan stretched almost thirty years beyond the playwright’s death—so long that he led the sea change from the High Renaissance into a dramatically new musical era. Even in his final decades, Monteverdi remained a revolutionary composer who forever changed expectations about what music is capable of expressing.
This Friday at Nordstom Recital Hall, Pacific MusicWorks opens their new season with an opportunity to experience just what makes Monteverdi such a musical icon—not the long-dead pioneer of the music history textbooks, but an unbelievably imaginative poet of sounds who can still stir your soul to its core.
Filed under: early music, Monteverdi, Pacific MusicWorks
November 3, 2014 • 9:32 am Comments Off on A San Francisco Halloween
A San Francisco Halloween
October 31, 2014 • 11:30 am Comments Off on Handel’s Witty, Urbane, Subversive Art: Staging Partenope
Handel’s Witty, Urbane, Subversive Art: Staging Partenope
One more chance to see this Partenope production: on Sunday afternoon. If you’re in the Bay Area, try to catch this — it’s worth it.
Filed under: Uncategorized
October 28, 2014 • 12:01 am Comments Off on Dazed, Confused, and Lovestruck: Twelfth Night at Seattle Shakespeare
Dazed, Confused, and Lovestruck: Twelfth Night at Seattle Shakespeare
Jay Myers as Orsino and Allie Pratt as Viola. Photo by John Ulman.
“Why, this is very midsummer madness!” exclaims Countess Olivia in the middle of Twelfth Night — just as the whirligigs of the plot against Malvolio start cranking away. Olivia’s normally uptight steward has been set up to believe his boss is suddenly overcome with uncontrollable passion for him and is putting on a display that makes for one of the most outrageously funny scenes in all Shakespeare.
But Malvolio’s (David Quicksall) crazed behavior is easily matched by the antics indulged in by Olivia herself (Elinor Gunn) in Seattle Shakespeare Company’s deliriously unconventional new production, which opened this past weekend and which plays through Nov. 16 at the Center Theatre at Seattle Center. Visiting director Jon Kretzu approaches Twelfth Night as if it were a vastly elaborated version of the nocturnal spell cast in the Bard’s decade-earlier A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Just about everyone seems to wander about in a woozy haze of confused, mismatched desire.
Filed under: directors, review, Shakespeare
October 27, 2014 • 9:43 am Comments Off on The Rake’s Revels: Don Giovanni Parties It Up in Seattle
The Rake’s Revels: Don Giovanni Parties It Up in Seattle
Photo (c) Elise Bakketun
Here’s my Bachtrack review of the current Don Giovanni revival in Seattle:
Mozart’s drama about the legendary rake’s egress launches the first season under Seattle Opera’s new general director, Aidan Lang. However, the production originated here in 2007, and the current revival had of course been scheduled well in advance. In other words, it makes no statement about the new Lang era but is instead a reverberation of the Speight Jenkins years.
This production mines the comic possibilities inherent in the essentially picaresque, stop-start narrative pieced together by Da Ponte. The Overture, with its apocalyptic opening section introducing a cheerful, buffa main course, has always posed a musical conundrum, the solution to which, as in Tristan und Isolde, remains deferred until the end of the opera. Yet in Seattle’s McCaw Hall, those foreboding first chords have the effect rather of parentheses, of a statement that’s easily shunted aside until the topic comes up again, in rather nonsequitur fashion, during the grand finale.
Filed under: Mozart, review, Seattle Opera
October 25, 2014 • 9:56 am Comments Off on Purcell Meets Bartók in LA
Purcell Meets Bartók in LA
Tonight brings the opening of Los Angeles Opera’s curious pairing of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas with Bluebeard’s Castle by Bartók.
The Australian-born, Berlin-based director Barrie Kosky (intendant at the Komische Oper Berlin) has brought his staging of the double bill for Oper Frankfurt to LA.
In a recent Opera News profile, Kosky explained the connections he’s come to see between these two one-act operas:
“Both pieces are about arrival and departure in different ways. Both operas have a couple and the complexities of love in different ways as the central element of the pieces. And the third thing is, both pieces have a degree of sadness and melancholia running through them.”
Here’s a very brief introduction to the evening by LA Opera’s CEO Christopher Koelsch:
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 