Browsing: Classical

The 2017–18 season is shaping up to be a milestone for new opera productions by Canadian companies. In celebration of the country’s 150th birthday, several works with Canadian themes will get their world premieres in Calgary, Montreal, and Toronto. Furthermore, Vancouver Opera has a watershed season with the inaugural year of the Vancouver Opera Festival. If you missed its triumphant opening run in Montreal last spring, Opéra de Montreal’s production of Les Feluettes (Lilies) travels to Pacific Opera Victoria this April. The Lost Operas of Mozart City Opera of Vancouver, 27 to 29 October, 2016 It’s a little-known fact that…

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Verbier, Switzerland July 22 – August 7, 2016 For 23 years, Artistic Director Martin T:son Engstroem has curated the Verbier Festival with a dedicated commitment to intergenerational music making, encouraging the precocious energy of youth to collaborate alongside the cultivated gravitas of the some of the most respected musicians on the roster today. The famed Academy hosts young musicians and singers from across the globe assembling for orchestral, chamber music, and opera performances with the A-list. In the case of the 2016 edition the long-list red carpet roll out includes conductors Charles Dutoit and Gabor Takács-Nagy, pianist András Schiff, violinist…

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Who would have thought that acclaimed flautists are fans of smoked meat just like the rest of us? In today’s Video of the Day, McGill alumni and Montreal resident, Mika Putterman traipses around the Bernard Street Mile End deli, Lester’s Deli, while her rendition of Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s Allegro con Brio Sonata plays in the background. Between takes of meat slicers and Putterman playing her wooden flute, the slightly yellowed video filter conveys a deep sense of longing for the comfort of a picturesque day on Bernard Street. Shopkeepers smile. Customers laugh. And sunshine twinkles in the eye. The flute trills and…

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Mozart had a little boy, born four months before he died. Salieri recommended that the kid, Franx Xaver, should stick with the family trade and become a travelling pianist and composer. Trading on the Mozart name, F. X. made a living in places like Lemberg (Lviv), Salzburg and Karlsbad (Karlo Vivary). He died of stomach cancer in 1844, at the age of 53, never having married or settled down, living in awe of the father he never knew. The music he wrote is so little known that the sight of his name on a record sleeve makes you want to…

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ORFORD – Orford Musique, as the festival in the Eastern Townships now calls itself, got under way Friday night, almost a month after it started. The educational camp fires up well before the concert calendar. Thus the first non-student program, paradoxically, represented a farewell for at least a few of the teachers who had spent most of June in residence. It also represented the kind of event that I would gladly cross several county borders to hear. Louis Spohr’s Duo for Two Violins in A minor Op. 67 No. 1? Just try to hum that one. Or more to the point, just…

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+ A CD review of English composer Granville Bantock’s epic late-Romantic oratorio Omar Khayyam, re-released from the 1979 Lyrita version with the BBC orchestra and chorus under Norman Del Mar. + The results of the Seventh Cliburn International Amateur Piano Competition, held in Fort Worth TX, are in. + David Lang talks with The Guardian’s Kate Molleson about writing music for memorials. A classic daunting Lang commission: construct exactly the right music for collective remembrance. “Right,” he nods, but he doesn’t look daunted. “How to write something that seems ancient, like a kind of music whose origins we don’t question.…

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Austrian-born composer Ignaz Joseph Pleyel was born on June 18 1757. Living in Strasbourg during the Reign of Terror, he avoided the consequences that could have been brought on by his “foreign status” by composing highly patriotic French music. Upon moving to Paris in 1795, he founded a music publishing business and eventually started manufacturing pianos. His son Camille eventually took the reins of Pleyel and Cie, who provided pianos to Frédéric Chopin. Watch a performance of a Chopin waltz on a restored 1848 Pleyel grand piano.

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It must be a seasonal thing. When fresh mushrooms simmer and asparagus gently steams, it starts raining …Haydn. Sure enough, four Haydn releases have landed this month. Decca has a positively frisky set of four symphonies, 78-81, from Ottavio Dantone and the Accademia Bizantina. The period-instrument precision is awe-inspiring, a worthy counterpoint to that epochal Decca set (1969-73) of Haydn symphonies from Antal Dorati and the Philharmonia Hungarica. Dorati changed the weather for Haydn while, with 104 symphonies, confirming the prejudice that the composer wrote too much. Other conductors gave up midway. I like Dantone’s note-perfect approach very much and…

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In May 2015, visibly frail, the august Nikolaus Harnoncourt stood before his Concentus Musicus Wien and directed two Beethoven symphonies in a reading that followed closely what the composer had written in his score. If Beethoven gave a primitive horn an impossible low D to play, that’s how Harnoncourt wanted it played and not, as others do, switched it to the bassoon. It’s a vital question, he said at the time, of “whether it is possible to achieve your goals.” Harnoncourt and his Concentus had spent their lives together trying to achieve a literal understanding of great art, written by…

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