Browsing: Classical Music

The one thing that keeps me from awarding this album the full five stars is that it is upside down. It opens with a perfectly decent performance of Bela Bartok’s first violin concerto by the Norwegian virtuoso Vilde Frang, with the Radio France philharmonic orchestra conducted by Mikko Franck. Frang, who is 32, has been performing since she was ten years old. Everything she does is perfectly lovely and agreeable. The first Bartok concerto, a youthful effusion of innocent love, is not going to change our lives. The octet, on the other hand, might. George Enescu was one of the great…

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New York, NY (September 6, 2018)—The Metropolitan Opera will open its 134th  season on Monday, September 24, with a new production of Saint-Saëns’s biblical tragedy Samson et Dalila, conducted by Sir Mark Elder and starring Elīna Garanča and Roberto Alagna, last seen together at the Met in acclaimed performances of Bizet’s Carmen. Laurent Naouri co-stars as the High Priest opposite Elchin Azizov as the Philistine King Abimélech and Dmitry Belosselskiy as the Old Hebrew. Making his Met debut, Tony Award-winner Darko Tresnjak directs the first new Met production of the opera in 20 years.  The opening performance will be simulcast…

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Calgary, Canada, September 4, 2018—The three Finalists for the top prize at the 2018 Honens International Piano Competition were announced just after midnight in Calgary, following five intense days of Semifinals. Han Chen (Taiwan / age 26), Nicolas Namoradze (Georgia / age 26), and Llewellyn Sanchez-Werner (United States / age 21), will vie for the title of Honens Prize Laureate and be awarded the world’s largest prize of its kind—$100,000 (CAD) and an Artistic Development Program valued at a half-million dollars. “The Jury had a difficult, if not nearly impossible, task before them but one that they completed with great…

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Rigoletto and Das Rheingold The Opéra de Montréal kicks off the season with Verdi’s tragic Rigoletto. This italian classic, inspired by Victor Hugo’s Le roi s’amuse, will be performed on September 15, 18, 20 and 22. Two Canadian singers are featured in this production: baritone James Westman and the soprano Myriam Leblanc play respectively the bouffon Rigoletto and his daughter Gilda. The Duke of Mantua will be sung by the tenor Rame Lahaij while the assassin Sparafucile and his sister Magdalena will be portrayed by the bass Vartan Gabrielian and Canadian mezzo Caroline Sproule. This is the perfect chance to…

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Saturday, September 1 was one of the busiest journeys of the five-day Festival with 6 indoor concerts, a Masterclass with Russian accordionist Roman Jbanov,  a Trad Quebecois dance event and free concerts held all over the town in different outdoor stages and restaurants. I also wanted to visit the Accordion Museum at the historical Manoir et four a pain Couillard and the photographic exhibition by Julien Simard which documented 30 years of the festival’s history. My first order of business was to meet with accordion prodigy Andrea Di Giacomo. The 22-year-old left the audience in awe at the Opening night…

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It all started in 1985, during dinner. Ted Perry, founder of the British independent label Hyperion Records, asked the celebrated collaborative pianist Graham Johnson what he would most like to record. Johnson’s answer was simply, “All of Schubert’s Lieder.” Perry agreed immediately. Schubert set more than 700 texts, most as songs for solo voice, but also for vocal ensemble. Almost all are accompanied by piano. Ironically, it took 18 years for Schubert to compose his Lieder (1810-1828), the same time that it took Hyperion (1987-2005) to record and distribute 37 compact discs featuring more than 60 individual singers. Johnson was…

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Composed in 1827 by Franz Schubert, Winterreise is a landmark in the annals of classical music. So much so that that this 24-song cycle for voice and piano based on poems by Wilhelm Müller has been recorded an estimated 200 times. The words convey the wanderings of a man befallen by an unrequited love. The cycle, however, deals less with the man’s states of mind than the images of loneliness conjured by the winter scenery, or the people that cross his path, like the hurdy-gurdy player, a fellow wanderer whose company he solicits. Winterreise is truly one of the great…

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I am lucky to have been able to work at what I love around the world for almost 20 years: performing with wonderful singers and instrumentalists. I also teach master classes on this profession that might be considered “in the shadows,” since it’s not about playing a recital or being a soloist with an orchestra. However, my profession is most certainly that of a pianist. I don’t “accompany” or “collaborate.” I play the piano. Chamber music and sharing with other musicians, on stage or in studio, is a different art than that of being a soloist. Although it’s the same…

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For non-Francophone singers, the difficulties involved in singing French correctly can be easy to explain. The issues are: French has more vowels than many other languages, especially English, with some peculiar nasal vowels. Liaisons are also risky for non-French speakers, and there are some basic guidelines for those. It’s also commonly said that French does not have a tonic accent, so the problem arises: how can a singer make the phrasing sound “colloquial” without avoiding the accents that are specific in classical music, i.e. the first and third beats in a 4/4 bar? Then there are the grammatical difficulties, which…

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At the turn of the 20th century, the tradition of the drawing-room ballad still held sway. Songs of little literary value by Liza Lehmann, Maude Valerie White, Arthur Sullivan, Edward German and others were extremely popular. While Hubert Parry (especially his 12 sets of songs, comprising settings of Shakespeare and other important English poets, called English Lyrics), Charles Stanford and Arthur Somervell were trying to raise the standard of song-writing, their efforts paled when Edward Elgar presented his cycle Sea Pictures months before the new century. It was in many respects the beginning of the British art song renaissance. Though…

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