Music
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National Black Theatre Festival
Audience as Congregation in Winston-Salem
By: - Aug 10th, 2019Thirty years ago the late Larry Leon Hamlin founded National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The biannual event, July 29 to August 3, featured 30 productions on stages in and around the city, They ranged from intensive dramas to entertaining musicals. A great part of the experience was being part of audiences that might better be described as congregations. People assemble from all over American for this unique celebration of African American history, theatre and culture.
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Oliver Beer's Vessel Orchestra at the MET Breuer
Nico Muhly and John Zorn compose for the Vessels
By: - Aug 13th, 2019The Metropolitan Museum of Art has mounted its first sound-based installation. British artist Oliver Beer selected 32 vessels from the Museum's vast collection. They form a 32 note chromatic scale which can performed on an electronic keyboard. The exhibit was a feast for eyes and ears.
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Yang Liping's Under Seige at Mostly Mozart
Stunning Dance at the David Koch Theater
By: - Aug 11th, 2019Yang Liping has created a dance drama in such startling colors and designs that the audience is swept into the single Ancient Pipa melody of the same title. The tapping of swords, soldiers cries and horses whinnying and snorting are all suggested as the song portrays the end battle of the war for control of China in 205 B.C. The armies of the Chu and the Han face off in dance. Blood has never been so beautifully suggested, as a mass of red feathers fly through the air, some streaking the bodies of soldiers.
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Fall Springs at Barrington Stage Company
Fracking a World Premiere Musical
By: - Aug 15th, 2019Juke box musicals with butkis for plots have become the norm. Kudos to Barrington Stage for its world premiere Fall Springs which actually has a compelling book. But fracking, the musical, oh my goodness! While it has entertaining moments this creation by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb and Niko Tsakalakos is a whacky long shot. It's more than just a town that sinks in the sludge.
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Dell Arte Opera's La Liberazione di Ruggiero
Brilliant Baroque Presentation of the First Opera by a Woman
By: - Aug 17th, 2019In their summer home at La Mama in New York, dell'Arte Opera is presenting the first opera composed by a woman, Francesca Caccini. The composer understands the power of women well. She also portrays the power of evil in women. An exciting performance by a stellar cast of young artists accompanied by a small ensemble featuring lutes was conducted by Charles Weaver.
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TIME:Spans Festival at DiMenna Center
Nikel with Tscherkassky's CinemaScope Trilogy
By: - Aug 17th, 2019TIME:SPANS is a Contemporary Music Festival presented by the Earle Brown Music Foundation Charitable Trust at the DiMenna Center in New York. The Nikel Ensemble was featured in the first half of the Festival. Nothing daunts them. Wearing long extensions on their fingers, they kept the beat to Simon Løffler's music which accompanied a Peter Tscherkassky adaptation of The Entity, a classic psychological horror film.
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Jenufa by Leoš Janácek
Produced by Santa Fe Opera
By: - Aug 19th, 2019With the exception of a little light relief in the wedding preparation, Jenufa is tense and emotionally charged from beginning to end. Janácek endows his lead characters with complexity and with demanding vocals. In keeping with the tone of the action, much of the vocalization is harsh, yet particularly in the orchestra, appealing passages emerge. Overall, the score fulfills many demands with great success.
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The Pearl Fishers at Santa Fe Opera
Georges Bizet with Libretto by Eugène Carmon and Michel Carré
By: - Aug 20th, 2019Many operas have suffered a rocky road to recognition and appreciation, The Pearl Fishers, among them. Yet when one considers its virtues, it is hard to understand why. Santa Fe Opera presented a rare and much appreciated production.
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The Thirteenth Child at Opera Santa Fe
By Poul Ruders with Libretto by Becky and David Starobin
By: - Aug 21st, 2019In an age of sweeping movement toward gender equity, Danish composer Poul Ruders has surprisingly drawn on a Grimm fairytale as a source for female heroics and female enabling. The result is a fable for adults – a taut and riveting opera, yet one that begs for more. Santa Fe Opera’s world premiere of The Thirteenth Child offers stunning production values that enhance the score and yield an engaging musical drama.
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Ladies Night at Dell'Arte Opera Ensemble
Bond, Musgrave and Viardot Intrigue and Engage
By: - Aug 22nd, 2019Dell’Arte Opera Ensemble, always venturesome, presented an evening in which three female composers were featured Franz Liszt had said that in Pauline Viardot the world had finally found a woman composer of genius. Her short opera Cendrillon was performed in full.
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Gladys Knight and The Spinners
Soulful Nostalgia at Tanglewood
By: - Aug 29th, 2019It was a soulful night of nostalgia at Tanglewood. The Spinners went on at 7 and cooked. We needed the heat on a cool wet night. In ever sense they warmed up the audience for Gladys Knight. There was a long intermission before she went on at ten of nine and by 10:25 after some 20 songs we made our way home.
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Squeezing in Tanglewood
Difford &Tilbroo, Forty Years Later
By: - Aug 31st, 2019Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook are treated like royalty. They are often referred to as prolific composers like Lennon & McCartney. They have been working together for forty years-churning out hit after hit. Their genius was shared with a jubilent and dancing in the aisles audience at Tanglewood.
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Ben Harper and Trombone Shorty at Tanglewood
Two Distinct Musical Styles
By: - Sep 01st, 2019Special concerts do not happen too often in one's lifetime. Fortunately, the double bill of Ben Harper and The Innocent Criminals paired with Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue, fit the bill as one of the most exciting musical shows that I have witnessed.
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Reba McEntire at Tanglewood
Packed Shed Ends 2019 Season
By: - Sep 02nd, 2019From 4:20 PM to an exit at 5:45 PM country music star Reba McEntire laid down a vapor trail of a jet charged fifteen tunes. It was the final performance of a record setting 2019 Tanglewood season.
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Clark Will Screen Live at the Met
Opera Featured at Williamstown Museum
By: - Sep 05th, 2019The Clark Art Institute will air the complete 2019–20 season of ten live performances from The Metropolitan Opera, held on select Saturdays beginning in October 12 and concluding in May 2020, in high definition from the Clark’s state-of-the-art auditorium. A special holiday encore presentation of The Magic Flute will be held on Sunday, December 8.
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Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center
Live from Lincoln Center Presents first International Broadcast
By: - Sep 04th, 2019The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center is upward bound, on an odyssey filmed by Live From Lincoln Center as they journeyed through Greece. We visit the remote hills of Pelion and churches in Volos and Milies. Unusual and exotic locations are the setting of performances: from a Bach violin solo performed movingly by Aaron Boyd in a magnificent amphitheater to the wonderful Octet for strings that Mendelssohn composed at 16 years of age as he embarked on his classical career.
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Kamala Sankaram's New Opera at HERE
Kristin Marting, Opera on Tap and Experiments in Opera Join Forces
By: - Sep 08th, 2019HERE and Opera on Tap are presenting Kamala Sankaram's Looking at You, an opera which takes a provocative approach to the end of privacy. We wittingly and unwittingly allow cyber companies to strip us. Rob Handel's brilliant libretto is in the tradition of Experiments in Opera productions. Its narrative arc and apt language combine with thick orchestration using whatever style brings us face to face with issues in a story.
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Britten's Billy Budd Based on Melville
At San Francisco Opera
By: - Sep 09th, 2019Michael Grandage’s production has been revived several times since its inauguration almost a decade ago, and it’s easy to see why. The staging is sensational, dominated by the depiction of the innards of the man o’ war. Although Billy Budd underwent revisions after its debut in 1951, it is surprising that the American premiere didn’t occur until 1970.
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John Zorn World Premiere at Columbia University
Pianist Stephen Gosling Paints in Notes
By: - Sep 12th, 2019The first of a series of monthly pop up concerts at the Miller Theatre at Columbia University presented the world premiere of John Zorn’s 18 Studies from the Later Sketchbooks of JMW Turner. This expansive work embraces a variety of styles and forms, all inspired by the watercolors of 19th-century English painter Joseph Mallord William Turner. Pianist Stephen Gosling, a masterful interpreter of contemporary music and particularly Zorn's, performed.
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Reggae Band Steel Pulse
The Cabot Theater, Beverly, Mass.
By: - Sep 14th, 2019Performing at the Cabot Theater in Beverly, to a packed and “on your feet” audience, David Hinds (vocals, guitarist) and longtime bandmate Selwyn Brown (keyboardist) kept an edge to their message of social and political outrage. The evening featured the first release by Steel Pulse in over a decade "Mass Manipulation" (2019, Rootfire Cooperative / Wiseman Doctrine).
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Amadeus at North Coast Repertory Theatre
Sir Peter Schaffer’s Musical Still Rocks Mozart
By: - Sep 15th, 2019Director Baird’s bold vision required him to strip-down the script to 10 performing characters without sacrificing any of the drama and/or light comedy moments that run throughout Shaffer’s illuminating, potent, tragic story concerning the early death, at 35 years of age, of musical genius Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (an astonishing Rafael Goldstein).
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Hitchcock's Psycho Score at NY Philharmonic
Orchestra Performs Bernard Hermann's Classic
By: - Sep 15th, 2019The New York Philharmonic performed the New York premiere of Bernard Hermann’s Psycho score, accompanying a huge projection of the film. Richard Kaufman, a veteran conductor of film and television productions, conducted. David Geffen Hall was filled with a hip audience of film buffs, who cheered when the classic image of the Bates Motel first appeared on the screen.
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Boston Rocker Ric Ocasek at 75
With Ben Orr Founded The Cars
By: - Sep 16th, 2019The counterculture in Boston geared up in the summer of 1968. The music scene, WBCN, and alternative media were well established when The Cars emerged with a self titled album in 1978. They went on to record a string of hits breaking up a decade later. After kicking around with a variety of folk/ rock configurations Ric Ocasek and Ben Orr established a mega group that was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year. Orr died in 2000 and Ocasek died yesterday at 75. They were an integral part of a golden age of Boston rock.
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Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss
Produced by Opera San Jose
By: - Sep 17th, 2019The intersection of the world of grand opera and musical confection rarely occurs. An exception to that rule would be Johann Strauss’s operetta Die Fledermaus. Maestro Michael Morgan maintains brisk pace throughout the musical sections, resulting in a spirited rendering of the score.
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Romeo and Juliet by Charles Gounod
Produced by San Francisco Opera
By: - Sep 17th, 2019Charles Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet faithfully follows Shakespeare’s dramatic narrative and adds a score of great beauty that has graced the repertory since its spectacular debut in 1867. San Francisco Opera’s faithful production possesses sterling artistry and striking staging that honor this compelling opera.
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