Music
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Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812
Pastiche of War and Peace
By: - Dec 07th, 2016What started Off Broadway at Ars Nova, with three steps in between, has transferred to Broadway. Based on a 70 page slice of Tolstoy's War and Peace the explosively inovative Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 is the one to beat as best musical come awards season.
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Isaac Mizrahi Narrates Peter and the Wolf
John Heginbotham and Ensemble Signal Are Icing
By: - Dec 05th, 2016Of course the costumes are terrific. Isaac Mizrahi, narrator and imaginer of this production, is a top flight designer. Each animal and human has a few eyecatching details. Prokofiev is always fabulous. All the elements come together in the Guggenheim's Works and Process Christmas celebration.
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yMusic Arrives at Carnegie
Unusual Instrumental Mix Triumphs
By: - Dec 03rd, 2016If there is an argument for YouTube and the ever-expanding internet, it is made by this group of superb young musicians, classically-trained, impeccable artists who are open to anything.
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Boston Early Music Festival's Versailles
Pastiche Composed for Apartments of Louis XIV
By: - Dec 02nd, 2016Louis XIV was a great arts patron, but like most powerful men, he liked to be flattered. The two divertissements revived by the BEMF are sycophantic but charming to listen to and see. As usual, the BEMF forces excelled in a highly stylized production.
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Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra at Carnegie
Semyon Bychkov Takes Us Beyond Words
By: - Dec 02nd, 2016A twenty-five note chord indeed. But that’s how Detlov Glanert starts his composition Theatrum Bestiarum. The singing of a thousand birds, the howling of the storm, the lapping of waves and the crackling of the fire. We are in the midst of musical feeling at Carnegie Hall as Glanert crashes around us and Mahler follows. A thrilling evening of brass and drums.
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First Night Saratoga 2017
New Years Eve celebration of the Arts
By: - Dec 01st, 2016First Night is the most affordable, accessible, family-friendly, safe and exciting way to spend New Year's Eve in the region. On Saturday, December 31st join over 15,000 revelers as Saratoga Art’s presents one of the oldest and largest First Night celebrations in the country. Starting with the 5k roadrace at Skidmore College at 5:30pm, culminating with fireworks in Congress Park at midnight and packed full of live music, dance, comedy and magic in between, this event will be a highlight of your outgoing year.
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Ivan Fischer Conducts New York Philharmonic
Musical Chairs Play Beethoven and Dvorak
By: - Nov 27th, 2016Conductor Iván Fischer led the New York Philharmonic in a startling program, not because Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major or Dvorak’s Eighth Symphony in G Major are unfamiliar. Yet they sounded particularly new and fresh in this performance. Fischer characteristically releases phrases in a swell and dares to experiment with dynamic extremes, particularly in the Beethoven, where both the soloist and the orchestra often whisper.
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Boston Lyric Opera Does Turnage's Greek
Retelling of Oedipus Rex OK's Incest
By: - Nov 23rd, 2016Mark-Anthony Turnage created the kind of scandal the arts love when in 1988 he premiered his first opera "Greek." A punkish provocation, it set the hoary myth of Oedipus, he who killed his father and married his mother, in a declining Thatcherite Britain. In choosing it, the BLO, in a dynamic production, asks whether it is still relevant.
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Jonathan Dove's Flight at Juilliard
Operatic Enchantments Fly
By: - Nov 21st, 2016Jonathan Dove's Flight is given a near perfect mounting this fall at the Juilliard School. Juilliard's neighbor across the way could take a page on opera production from the young artists whose talent and sensibility bodes well for the future of the opera form.
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Tanglewood 2017
Expanded Role for Andris Nelsons Includes Sharing Film Night
By: - Nov 17th, 2016In his most significant commitment yet to Tanglewood, Andris Nelsons will lead both the opening and closing BSO concerts, Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, Resurrection, and Beethoven Symphony No. 9; Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 with Kristine Opolais; an opera gala with Ms. Opolais and Dmitri Hvorostovsky performing excerpts from Simon Boccanegra, La traviata, and Eugene Onegin; the world premiere of John Williams’s Markings with violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter; and the first-ever BSO and festival concert performance of the complete Das Rheingold, a tour de force milestone in the history of the festival.
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William Kentridge's Return of Ulysses
The Father of Opera Celebrated
By: - Nov 17th, 2016Claudio Monteverdi is considered the first major composer of an opera. The richness of his talent is on abundant display in William Kentridge’s direction of The Return of Ulysses.
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Eastman Philharmonia at Alice Tully Hall
Renée Fleming Sings Kevin Puts
By: - Nov 16th, 2016The Eastman Philharmonia under the brilliant Neil Varon, performed Maurice Ravel, Kevin Puts and Serge Prokofiev at Alice Tully Hall.
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Venetian Coronation at Lincoln Center
Gabriele Conducted By Paul McCreesh
By: - Nov 13th, 2016For a Venetian Coronation, the golden wood of Alice Tully Hall is lit around the stage by floor floodlights cast upwards. The 1595 Coronation ritual inducted Marino Grimani who would rule until his death in 1605. The Baroque style of the performance was delivered with clarity and beauty Challenges in playing period instruments with fewer vents and using the high larynx to produce tones of exquisite beauty were not apparent in the formal but easy movements of the groups.
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Thomas Ades and the Boston Symphony Orchestra
British Composer Begins Three Year Partnership with BSO
By: - Nov 11th, 2016Young (45 years old) hotshot Thomas Ades is a triple threat: composer, conductor and pianist. In his first outing with the BSO as artistic partner he showcased each of those skills. The results were mostly good. Among the highlights was the local premiere of his "Totentanz," a major work by any standard.
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Carnegie Hall's Invites Music in the Resnick Center
Developing Performers and Listeners Alike
By: - Nov 08th, 2016Carnegie Hall programs explore an individual's musicality. For those who are born with the musical gene, their basic instincts are led out into the beat and the song. For those who do not have the gene, music is brought inside and listeners made.
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Xian Zhang, Maestra of the New Jersey Symphony
Handel, Beethoven and Strauss at the Bergen PAC
By: - Nov 04th, 2016The New Jersey Symphony tours the state, winter, summer and fall. Starting her inaugural season as Music Director, Xian Zhang was welcomed enthusiastically by residents of Englewood.
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Bluebeard's Castle at the BSO
Hungarian Rarity a Perfect Halloween Opera
By: - Nov 03rd, 2016Bela Bartok is known for his folklore inspired spiky modernism, which he applied distinctively to orchestral and chamber works. "Bluebeard" is his only opera, and it is an awkward undramatic outlier in the repertory. Its lushly beautiful music, however, is a powerful reason why it is revived on occasion. The BSO under Charles Dutoit did it proud.
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Carnegie Celebrates Steve Reich's 80th Birthday
To Defy God or Not is the Big Question
By: - Nov 02nd, 2016The year long birthday celebration for Steve Reich, our country's foremost composer, continues. At Carnegie Hall, we heard a Quartet from 2013 and the world premier of Pulse with the International Contemporary Ensemble. The evening was capped by Three Tales, a collaboration between Reich and his wife, Beryl Korot, a video artist. While Reich appears to be fit as a fiddle, these tributes to his decades might better be annual for all the pleasure they offer.
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Richard Tucker Gala at Carnegie Hall
Opera's All Stars Gather
By: - Oct 31st, 2016The Richard Tucker Gala began about forty years ago to celebrate the career of a tenor who made his mark around the world, moving from Synagogue to opera stage and back. Today, the annual prize is awarded to deserving young talent who often end at the top of the opera world. Tonight's awardee, Tamara Wilson, shows all the promise of a huge career.
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Babel from the White Lights Festival
Cacaphony of Words, Dance and Music
By: - Oct 28th, 2016The impact of the Tower of Babel is immediately felt in the silence of the Rose Theater. Watching steel frames in the shapes of cubes and rectangles built up and toppled on stage, seeing people trapped by them and also liberated graphically, drives home our divided world and the need for human unification. These structures both divide and unite. There is hope.
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Kallor Opera, The Tell Tale Heart
Tales from the Crypt
By: - Oct 27th, 2016The ironic title of the website for the presentations at the Crypt of the Chutch of the Intercession in New York is 'death of classical.' Surely if classical music is to survive during the 21st century it will be in performances that are taken out to its audience in venues which are unique and intimate. Andrew Ousley, who conceived the Crypt Sessions, has a deep sense of what works in the venue, buried in the beautiful arches of a church in New York. The Tell Tale Heart was his Halloween, or perhaps All Saints Day, offering.
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Ian Bostridge, Thomas Adès, Winterreise
Schubert Set in Carnegie Hall
By: - Oct 24th, 2016Ian Bostridge not only admits that he has been obsessed for years by Winterreise, but he has written a superb book on the piece and obsession. The wonderful tenor has so absorbed the music and poetry that he seems to step behind the performance and let this remarkable work shine. Thomas Adès constantly reveals Schubert at the piano.
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Master Voices Presents "27"
Ricky Ian Gordon's Opera Stars Stephanie Blythe as Gertrude Stein
By: - Oct 21st, 2016The Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibit on 27 Rue de Fleurus, the Gertrude Stein/ Alice B. Toklas salon frequented by Picasso, Matisse, Man Ray, and others, largely consisted of blown up black and white photos. In every way, the Master Voices production colors these lives. In addition to the sublime presence of Stephanie Blythe as Gertrude, Heidi Stober and Theo Lebow thrilled.
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More Fun with Jeff and Jane
Concert at Williams Inn Nov. 19
By: - Oct 17th, 2016Dyno rockers Jeff and Jane Hudson will present an (ahem) New Wave Party at the Williams Inn on November 19. The vintage punk rockers are promoting their latest release The Middle which combines new and old material. Until recently they operated an antiques store at Mass MoCA. Jane is a legendary genius while Jeff is generally viewed as a piece of work. Together they make strange and rhapsodic music. Never miss one of their iconic events.
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Brahms' Human Requiem
White Lights Festival
By: - Oct 16th, 2016Can listeners experience music as their own, an inside experience enjoyed by performers? Yes, in the extraordinary productioin conceived by Jochen Sanig and brought to life by the Rundfunkchor Berlin under Simon Halsey assisted by Nicolas Fink. The setting was Synod House at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Brahms' Requiem was the experience.
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