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Browsing: Classical Music

Chandos’s Vaughan Williams Songs of Travel Notable

By Norman Lebrecht on 29 December 2017 Art Song, Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly

Ralph Vaughan Williams: Songs of Travel (Chandos) James Gilchrist, tenor; Anna Tilbrook, piano; Philip Dukes, viola At the turn of the 20th century, the world was wide open to young men of means. Ships were getting faster, trains more frequent and motor cars were appearing on the roads. Faced with these exciting possibilities, the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams decided to stay home, collecting the remains of a musical civilisation that was being trampled by the march of technology. Together with his pal Gustav Holst, Vaughan Williams recorded people singing in pubs and fields. Then he wrote Songs of Travel. The…

Remembering Twelve Days of Giving: Opera Philadelphia’s Festival O17

By Charles Geyer on 22 December 2017 Concert Reviews, Opera

A RETROSPECTIVE: of Opera Philadelphia’s inaugural Festival O17, September 14 through 25, 2017. As the calendar rolls into those Twelve Days famed for lovers’ gift-giving extravagance (pipers piping, lords a-leaping, and those five golden rings), let us pause to glance back in appreciation at twelve days of equally notable largesse that came earlier in the year, courtesy of Opera Philadelphia. Opera Philadelphia’s “Festival O17” – the first installment of a splashy new tradition that will inaugurate each new Opera Philadelphia season going forward – ran from September 14 through 25. with an explosion of operatic activity throughout the City of…

Delta Piano Trio’s Fresh Take on Shostakovich

By Norman Lebrecht on 22 December 2017 Chamber Music, Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly, Piano, Strings

Shostakovich, Auerbach: Piano Trios Delta Piano Trio As the last releases of the year drop through the door, this is an instant ear grabber. Debate has raged for three decades as to whether Dmitri Shostakovich was a limp Soviet puppet or a secret resistant. The first view was advanced by US musicologists, who would not be satisfied until they had a signed document saying ‘I hate Stalin.’ Russian friends and fans of the composer heard his dissidence expressed in the music. Thankfully, the dispute is being resolved by a new generation of musicians who come fresh to the music. The…

Last Supper: Thomas Adès Serves Up After-Dinner Mayhem in The Exterminating Angel

By Charles Geyer on 17 December 2017 Concert Reviews, Opera

REVIEW: of Thomas Adès’s new opera The Exterminating Angel, viewed in live HD broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera, November 18, 2017. Guess who’s coming dinner – and never leaving? In the case of composer Thomas Adès’s new opera, The Exterminating Angel, the answer is: everyone. Based on the 1962 film El ángel exterminador by cinematic provocateur Luis Bunuel, Adès’s opera ruthlessly tracks the exigent plight (and deteriorating sanities) of a group of bourgeois Spanish socialites gathered for a posh post-opera soirée only to find that, for reasons beyond anyone’s ken, they can’t bring themselves to go home. Think Noel Coward…

Lebrecht Weekly Album of the Year 2017

By Norman Lebrecht on 14 December 2017 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly, Piano, Romantic

In these diminished times, any year that yields a couple of releases that can rank with, and perhaps displace, the legends of recording history must be counted a good one. On these terms, 2017 was a pretty good vintage. There was an impressive Berlioz Requiem from Erato, a Hänssler retrieval of the last known recital of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the first in a promising Chandos series of the orchestral works of Richard Rodney Bennett and, at the opposite end of the scale, a Jonas Kaufmann assault on both tenor and mezzo parts of Das Lied von der Erde – a Sony…

Herbert Blomstedt, © Martin Lengemann

Bruckner and Blomstedt in Berlin are worth the journey

By Arthur Kaptainis on 11 December 2017 Classical, Classical Music, Concert Reviews, Orchestral, Romantic

Did you catch Herbert Blomstedt and Maria João Pires with the Berlin Philharmonic on Saturday? All it took was a smartphone, a subscription to the Berlin Philharmonic Digital Concert Hall and, optionally, a better-than-average pair of earbuds. I did it the old-fashioned way and do not regret the decision. Hearing one of the world’s most famous orchestras led by one of the world’s most venerable conductors in one of the world’s most illustrious concert halls added up to one of the best concert experiences imaginable. To risk another one-of qualification, the symphony on the program was one of my favorites,…

REVIEW: Berlin Staatsoper Hänsel und Gretel is an All-dressed Affair

By Arthur Kaptainis on 9 December 2017 Concert Reviews, Contemporary, Opera

BERLIN – Sending Achim Freyer after Hänsel und Gretel was both a mortifying and an intriguing concept. The German director is one of the stars of Regietheater and rarely lets an operatic story tell itself. While the opening on Dec. 8 of Engelbert Humperdinck’s seasonal charmer at the renovated Staatsoper Unter den Linden was generally family-friendly, it was also overwrought, self-consciously surreal and cussedly hard to get involved in at any basic emotional level. All of which criticisms this 83-year-old Brecht protégé might well take as compliments. Credited with direction, design and costuming, Fryer applied himself most extravagantly to the…

Lebrecht Weekly – DG Trout Quintet Lacking

By Norman Lebrecht on 7 December 2017 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly, Romantic, Strings

Schubert: Trout quintet (DG) Anne-Sophie Mutter (violin), Daniel Trifonov (piano). Hwayoon Lee (viola), Maximilian Hornung (cello) and Roman Patkolo (bass). There are five trouts on the cover of DG’s new release and it’s clear from the photo that some are more pouty than others. Anne-Sophie Mutter (violin) takes up the most space, reclining on a divan. Sitting on the bare floor is Daniel Trifonov (piano). In the dark background are Hwayoon Lee (viola), Maximilian Hornung (cello) and Roman Patkolo (bass). If this were just a ranking of record industry hierarchies it would hardly be worth a mention, but the recording…

En Amour Avec Le Violoncelle with Denis Brott, Stéphane Tétreault and pianist Suzanne Blondin

By Newswire on 7 December 2017 Newswire, Strings

Montreal, Decembre 5, 2017 — The Conservatoire de musique de Montréal is pleased to invite you to attend a concert entitled En Amour Avec Le Violoncelle, with cellists Denis Brott and Stéphane Tétreault, as well as pianist Suzanne Blondin, Saturday, December 16, as part of the Vivace series of the Conservatoire. Soprano Aline Kutan and the students and graduates of the Conservatoire will also join the musicians, including cellists Dominique Beauséjour-Ostiguy, Vincent Bergeron, Pierre-Alain Bouvrette, Chloé Dominguez, Audréanne Filion, Laurence Gaudreau, Lorraine Gauthier-Giroux, Agnès Langlois, Bruno Tobon and others. They will perform a unique two-cello arrangement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Suite no 5 BWV 1011 in C minor, Friedrich August Kummer’s Duet op. 22 in…

Peter Bay and the ASO Take Prokofiev’s 5th Symphony “Beyond the Score”

By Paul E. Robinson on 6 December 2017 Classical, Classical Music, Concert Reviews, Orchestral

Beyond the Score: Prokofiev Symphony No. 5 – Pure Propaganda? (A multimedia exploration) Prokofiev: Symphony No. 5 in B flat major Op. 100 (complete performance) Austin Symphony Orchestra/Peter Bay Long Center for the Performing Arts, Austin, TX, December 2, 2017 British composer, arranger, broadcaster, teacher and writer Gerard McBurney has developed quite a reputation for his music appreciation series “Beyond the Score,” which takes a single major work by a composer and provides a context for it drawing on letters, contemporaneous political events, excerpts from the work itself as well as from other works by the same composer. This “Beyond…

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