Contemporary - my/maSCENA

Tamara Mumford as the Pilgrim, Eric Owens as Jaufré Rudel and Susanna Phillips as Clémence in Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de Loin. Photo by Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

Met Premiere: L’Amour de Loin by Kaija Saariaho and Amin Maalouf

By Xenia Hanusiak on 6 December 2016 Concert Reviews, Contemporary, Opera

The Metropolitan Opera’s production of L’Amour de Loin, by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, shines on the most trailblazing composer of the 21st century. It has been a limelight month for Saariaho in New York. Ensembles from the New York Philharmonic to educational institutions such as the Mannes School of Music have given Saariaho’s music a highlight in their programming calendar. These dedicated performances together with the house premiere of L’Amour de Loin at The Metropolitan Opera have not only addressed Saariaho’s stellar status but have inserted a post script on the position of female artists in opera. While Saariaho frequently…

Lebrecht Weekly – Elgar, Martinu: Cello concertos (Sony Classical)

By Norman Lebrecht on 18 November 2016 Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly, Strings

The Argentine-born Sol Gabetta, now in her mid-30s, made her first recording of the Elgar concerto six years ago in Denmark, an impressive performance stressed ever-so-faintly at the edges by the long shadow of Jacqueline Du Pré. In this live concert with the Berlin Philharmonic and Sir Simon Rattle, Gabetta is more languorous and, one suspects, more herself. The opening phrases are so leisurely you can imagine half the orchestra taking an illicit sip of tea from an under-chair flask, knowing there is plenty of time before they have to come in. But her tempo is immediately convincing and musically…

McGill Contemporary Music Ensemble to Perform Leroux’s “Apocalypsis”

By Newswire on 11 November 2016 Contemporary, Newswire

McGill’s Schulich School of Music takes part in the Canadian Opera Company’s Free Concert Series in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre with the brightest and best in classical and jazz from November 22 through December 1. TORONTO: Friday, November 11, 2016 – As part of the 2016/2017 season of the Canadian Opera Company’s (COC) Free Concert Series in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre, The McGill Contemporary Music Ensemble will perform Philippe Leroux’s Extended Apocalypsis at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts on November 22. Montréal’s McGill Contemporary Music Ensemble – a high level chamber orchestra entirely dedicated to 20th…

Lebrecht Weekly – Shostakovich plays Shostakovich (Praga Digitals)

By Norman Lebrecht on 11 November 2016 Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly

If the print on this review goes blurry on your screen it’s because I’m still rubbing my eyes at the cast list on this astonishing trove of archive finds, unobtainable anywhere on line. The composer Dmitri Shostakovich was a capable pianist who sometimes participated in his own premieres. The people he played with were the elite of Russian music. The song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry, unplayable in public while Stalin was waging his anti-Semitic purge, existed as samizdat between Shostakovich and his friends, sung quietly in his apartment and theirs. The public premiere in January 1955 was sung by…

Lebrecht Weekly – Schoenberg and Shostakovich (CSO.Resound)

By Norman Lebrecht on 4 November 2016 Choral, Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly

Two composers in despair, reaching deep into their souls. Arnold Schoenberg, a penniless refugee in Los Angeles in 1938, was commissioned by a liberal temple to make a modern version of the Yom Kippur introductory prayer. Dmitri Shostakovich, dying of lung cancer in 1974, wrote a song cycle for bass singer and piano from Michelangelo’s battle between public expectation and personal need. Together, the two works contains some of the darkest moments known to music. Schoenberg, unexpectedly, delivers confidence, hope and consolation. Without yielding to the temptations of simple faith or melody, he conjures serenity out of musical austerity by…

Valérie Milot, Photo: Alain Lefort

Valérie Milot: Beyond the Harp

By Caroline Rodgers on 1 November 2016 Contemporary, Interviews, Orchestral, Quebec Music

Valérie Milot defines herself as a musician first and a harpist second. At age 31, she is nothing less than the most visible and active ambassador of the harp that Quebec has seen in recent history. She is the soloist-in-residence for Montreal’s Orchestre Métropolitain for the 2016–17 season. Music is important in the Milot family. They even play it together. “My father was a great lover of classical music,” she says. “He played several instruments, including classical guitar. We, his three children, took introductory music classes before we even went to school. It was part of our family life: we…

Lebrecht Weekly – György Kurtág: Complete string quartets (ATMA Classique)

By Norman Lebrecht on 28 October 2016 Chamber Music, Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly

Some of my least endurable musical moments have been spent trapped in a small hall listening to a new piece by Kurtág, the venerable, post-tonal Hungarian aphorist. Making sense of seemingly unrelated sounds, and clusters of sound, is made all the most uncomfortable by the occasional squeaks that emanate from dedicated musicians struggling with the composer’s demands. The relief is that Kurtág always writes short. The pain tends to be over in ten minutes. So it was with trepidation that I put on the Molinari Quartet’s album of Kurtág’s complete string quartets – a total of 50 minutes – and…

Leah Partridge, Photo: David Andrako

Putting Opera on the Spot, with On Site Opera

By Charles Geyer on 26 October 2016 Concert Reviews, Contemporary, Interviews, Opera, Romantic

COMPANY REVIEW: On Site Opera (New York City); PERFORMANCE REVIEW: An Evening of Monodramas – La Morte de Cléopâtre by Hector Berlioz; and Miss Havisham’s Wedding by Dominick Argento; The Harmonie Club, 4 East 60th Street, New York, New York (September 29 and 30, 2016; viewed September 30). “Waiter! There’s a diva in my soup!” Actually, there wasn’t any soup – but a double helping of diva was definitely on the menu at Manhattan’s Upper East Side Harmonie Club on the evenings of September 29th and 30th. That’s when On Site Opera, a spry and peripatetic company that has been…

Heidi Stober (Alice B. Toklas) and Stephanie Blythe (Gertrude Stein), Photo: Erin Baiano

On a Recent Visit with Gertrude Stein

By Charles Geyer on 22 October 2016 Concert Reviews, Contemporary, Opera

OPERA REVIEW/ARTIST INTERVIEWS: Ricky Ian Gordon’s and Royce Vavrek’s 27, an opera about Gertrude Stein; at New York’s City Center, October 20 and 21, 2016. 27, the new opera about Gertrude Stein and her artistic cronies by composer Ricky Ian Gordon and librettist Royce Vavrek, was commissioned by and premiered at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in 2014. But the current City Center incarnation represents both a New York and a world premiere of the opera, as now reimagined and expanded by the composer and his original creative team to honor the 75th anniversary of that New York institution formerly…

Celebrating the Metro and The OSM’s New Octobass (Review)

By Rebecca Anne Clark on 21 October 2016 Concert Reviews, Contemporary, Orchestral, Quebec Music

Last night was the first performance of the OSM’s concert celebrating 50 years of the Montreal metro system, which first welcomed passengers in October 1966. To commemorate the occasion, the OSM and the STM co-commissioned two new works: José Evagelista’s orchestral piece Accelerando, and Robert Normandeau’s electroacoustic work Tunnel Azur. While this concert marks more than one historic premiere – Tunnel Azur is the first electroacoustic piece ever to be commissioned by the OSM and to be presented at the Maison Symphonique (read LSM’s article on the new work here) – the main question on Montreal music lovers’ minds seems to be,…

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