Last night I attended the last of three performances of a New York Philharmonic subscription program that cannily matched Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements with Ravel's 2nd Suite from the ballet Daphnis & Chloe for its second half, and began with Frank Peter Zimmermann as soloist in Beethoven's Violin Concerto. Music Director Alan Gilbert was on the podium. The orchestra provided excellent execution, as did Zimmermann. Yet I came away with curiously mixed impressions.
For … <Read More>
Last year I attended the Queens, NY, premiere of the "Five Borough Songbook," a collection of 20 songs commissioned from 20 composers by the Five Boroughs Music Festival. A few weeks ago, I attended the Manhattan premiere – the same twenty songs, but a slightly different mix of singers. I was curious to hear this music a second time, having been so impressed on first hearing. So on January 12 I was in the auditorium … <Read More>
One approaches performances by over-hyped younsters with great skepticism… but skepticism is defeated by Lang Lang, the young Chinese pianist who set a real challenge for himself by taking on Bela Bartok's 2nd Piano Concerto (1930-31), a monster of a piece both as a technical challenge and as a musical challenge. It is easy for somebody with big technique to make a big noise in this piece. More difficult is to play all the notes … <Read More>
Igor Stravinsky is generally considered one of the most important 20th century composers. Born in Russia in 1882, he left as a young composer to write ballets for Serge Diaghilev's Ballet Russe, which was based in Western Europe and performed its most celebrated premieres in Paris. Outside Russia when the communist takeover occurred, Stravinsky remained in the west, making his home variously in France, Switzerland, and finally the United States, where he died in New … <Read More>
In January 2010, a group of musicians organized under the name "Green Mountain Project" gave a free performance of Claudio Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610 to mark the 400th anniversary of the publication of that monumental work. They repeated in January 2011, and this time being clued-in, I attended. The event was held at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in the Times Square neighborhood of Manhattan. I thought the performance was nicely exuberant, but … <Read More>
When the season brochure for the Met came out last spring, I zeroed in on "The Enchanted Island" because Anthony Roth Costanzo, a brilliant young countertenor whose work thrills me, was billed as one of the performers. As soon as tickets became available for a "do your own" subscription, this was on my list. Although as a matter of principle I have some objections about what the Met did here, on its own terms I … <Read More>
I attended my last New York Philharmonic concert of 2011 on Thursday, December 29, which was the second presentation by the orchestra of their last subscription program of the calendar year. Alan Gilbert conducted, with guest artist Anne Sofie von Otter. The program consisted of Josef Haydn's Symphony No. 88 in G, six songs by Franz Schubert orchestrated by various individuals, the complete Mother Goose Ballet by Maurice Ravel, and as a finale, Ravel's "La … <Read More>
When the Met brochure came out last spring and I went through deciding what to attend, I hadn't paid attention to Gounod's "Faust." It was not on my priority list. But then I learned a few months ago that although Yannick Nezet-Seguin was the announced conductor for this new production, my friend Pierre Vallet would be filling in for him on Saturday night, December 17, thus making his Metropolitan Opera conducting debut. I quickly recruited … <Read More>
"Grading season" began for me on Tuesday, my Contracts students having taken their final exam on Monday afternoon (Dec. 12) and my Employment Discrimination students on Friday afternoon (Dec. 16). So now I face two little mountains of exams to grade. I try to do some grading every day, take a culture break when I can squeeze it in, and get in some office time preparing for spring semester, working on Lesbian/Gay Law Notes, and … <Read More>
Once again I had a weekend with sharply contrasting musical experiences. On Saturday night, I attended a program presented by the Miller Theatre at Columbia University Early Music Series, The Tallis Scholars in a program titled "Songs of May: A Christmas Celebration," at the appropriate venue of the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in the Times Square neighborhood of Manhattan. Then on Sunday afternoon, I attended the American Symphony Orchestra's program titled "Parallel Lives: … <Read More>