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Browsing: Classical Music

Bay and Austin Symphony Superb in Mahler Sixth

By Paul E. Robinson on 31 March 2017 Classical Music, Concert Reviews, Orchestral

MAHLER: Symphony No. 6. Austin Symphony Orchestra/Peter Bay, conductor. Long Center for the Performing Arts, Austin, Texas. March 25, 2017 Symphony No. 6 first saw the light of day in 1906 when Mahler himself conducted its premiere performance in Essen, Germany. Not well received, it was rarely performed again during his lifetime. Concert goers in the United States had to wait forty-one years (1947) after its premiere to hear it, and to this day performances of the Mahler 6th continue to be fairly rare. To be sure, there are plenty of recordings of Mahler’s 6th Symphony, but live performances are…

Lebrecht Weekly – Verdi: Requiem (LSO Live)

By Norman Lebrecht on 31 March 2017 CD and Book Reviews, Lebrecht Weekly, Romantic

The Barbican’s season opener last September was one of the great Requiems of my life. The London Symphony Orchestra had a spring in their step as they came on stage, the chorus had been seriously souped up by director Simon Halsey and the conductor, Gianandrea Noseda, waited at least half a minute until complete silence prevailed before he began. And silent it stayed. I have seldom sat among a more rapt London audience, not a cough in eighty minutes. Every individual in the orchestra displayed ferocious concentration. And, best of all, the quartet of soloists – Erika Grimaldi, Daniela Barcellona,…

Experience the “Tido Effect” – Music May Never Be the Same

By Charles Geyer on 30 March 2017 Arts Industry, Classical Music, Education

NEW TECHNOLOGY PROFILE: “Tido” – a new digital platform for learning, appreciating, and experiencing music; and INTERVIEW: with Tido originator Brad Cohen. It happened on a frigid evening back in January – a midwinter aesthetic epiphany prompted by first encounter with a new digital technology called “Tido.” The email invitation from the New York Public Library had been tantalizing, yet oblique. The Bruno Walter Auditorium, at the library’s Lincoln Center branch, was hosting an event featuring music by John Cage, plus some kind of demonstration of a new music-appreciation app. Well, that app proved to be Tido – and (be…

National Art Centre Statement Regarding Cancellation of Magnetic North Theatre Festival

By Newswire on 25 March 2017 Arts Industry, Classical, Classical Music

March 22, 2017 – OTTAWA (Canada) – The National Arts Centre (NAC) today expressed its regret over the cancellation of the Magnetic North Theatre Festival. Over the last week, the NAC, in its role as a co-presenter, met several times with Magnetic North’s management and board of directors, as well as the festival’s major public funders, to try to come up with a collective solution that would have made it possible to present the event in Ottawa next June. Magnetic North was founded in 2003 as a not-for-profit organization with an independent board of directors. Since the beginning of the…

LoftOpera's Otello, Photo: Robert Altman

With Rossini’s Otello, LoftOpera Tells a Hell of a Wife’s Tale

By Charles Geyer on 24 March 2017 Concert Reviews, Opera, Romantic

REVIEW: LoftOpera’s new production of Rossini’s Otello; INTERVIEWS: with maestro Sean Kelly, director John de los Santos, and soprano Cecilia Violetta López. They’ve Done It Again Scrappy, iconoclastic, resourceful, and unaffectedly hip, the LoftOpera company has been doing its own thing since 2013, demonstrating time and again – and with streetwise savvy – how an opera grows in Brooklyn. No rarefied proscenium-framed hothouse required. Just outer-borough grit, plus equal parts determination and talent. Then watch what springs up in a loft on the Gowanus Canal or a repurposed Navy Yard garage; a former brass foundry, a derelict warehouse, or a…

Lebrecht Weekly – Yo-Yo Ma, Chris Thile and Edgar Meyer: Bach trios (Nonesuch)

By Norman Lebrecht on 24 March 2017 Baroque and Early, CD and Book Reviews, Chamber Music, Lebrecht Weekly

Hard to know whether to give this confection one star or five. The dominant voice is the mandolin of Chris Thile, an instrument probably unknown to J S Bach who never wrote for it, but used often in modern transcriptions of his works. It sits more comfortably in a Bach score than, say, a tenor sax, but that does not make it remotely authentic. The other instruments at play here are a cello and double bass. What hits the ear from the off are clever, virtuosic trio adaptations of anything from a solo keyboard fugue from the Well-Tempered Clavier to…

Canadian Opera Company Assembles All-Canadian Cast for Louis Riel

By Newswire on 23 March 2017 Newswire, Opera

Toronto – The Canadian Opera Company has brought together an all-Canadian cast, led by renowned Canadian baritone Russell Braun in the title role, for its highly anticipated revival of Harry Somers’ Louis Riel. This new production of Louis Riel is co-produced with the National Arts Centre in anticipation of Canada’s sesquicentennial and runs for seven performances by the COC on April 20, 23, 26, 29, May 2, 5, 13, 2017 at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. This production will have its premiere in Ottawa by the NAC on June 15 and 17, 2017. Composed by Harry Somers…

Another Brick in the Wall, Photo: Yves Renaud

‘Another Brick in the Wall’ a Thoroughly Montréalais Work

By Claire McLeish on 23 March 2017 Concert Reviews, Contemporary, Opera, Quebec Music

Review: Another Brick in the Wall, l’Opéra de Montréal Viewed: March 13, 2017 At first glance, an adaptation of Pink Floyd’s 1979 concept album The Wall seems an odd choice for part of Montreal’s 375th Anniversary. However, a brief reflection on the genesis of the album brings this choice into better focus. According to rock legend, the story for The Wall came to Pink Floyd bassist and songwriter Roger Waters after a performance in Montreal: after allegedly spitting on a fan at show at the Olympic Stadium in July 1977, Waters turned inward and began to reflect on the excesses…

Mark Adamo's Little Women

Singing Our National Stories – The AMERICAN LYRIC THEATER… Part I – Beyond Words and Music, with Mark Adamo

By Charles Geyer on 21 March 2017 Contemporary, Interviews, Opera

Mark Adamo, in conversation with Charles Geyer It started as an idea over drinks. It became a quest to “achieve everything.” In 2002, Larry Edelson, then an assistant opera director completing his graduate degree at NYU, and Mark Adamo, the celebrated American composer-librettist of Little Women (one of the most oft-produced and critically lauded new operas of recent decades), were discussing – take a guess – American opera. Not how great it was, or how imperiled it was; not its funding nor its popularity – but something much more fundamental, and mysterious: Where it came from. The opera field was…

Canadian Soprano Kirsten MacKinnon One of Six Winners of 2017 Met Opera Auditions

By Newswire on 19 March 2017 Arts Industry, Canadian Music, Classical, Newswire, Opera, Quebec Music, Vocal

New York, NY (March 19, 2017) – After a months-long series of competitions at the district, regional, and national levels, a panel of expert judges named six young singers as the winners of the nation’s most prestigious vocal competition, the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. Each winner receives a $15,000 cash prize and the prestige and exposure that come with winning the competition that launched the careers of many of opera’s biggest stars. This year’s winners are Samantha Hankey, 24, mezzo-soprano (Eastern Region: Marshfield, MA); Kirsten MacKinnon, 26, soprano (Middle Atlantic Region: Vancouver, BC, Canada); Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, 23, countertenor…

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