On Sunday night (January 27), as most of the art-song community was packed into Carnegie Hall to hear a joint recital by the reigning divas of the moment – Renee Fleming and Susan Graham – I was at Central Presbyterian Church to hear the latest installment of Schubert & Co.’s audacious journey through all the lieder of Franz Schubert, allegedly the first time any concert series in New York has attempted to accomplish this feat … <Read More>
Music
Green Mountain Project on Record
For the last several years, Jolle Greenleaf’s Green Mountain Project has presented concerts during the first week of January. In 2010, 2011 and this January, they presented Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610. In 2012, they varied the bill of fare by assembling a vespers service using Monteverdi psalm settings from other publications (the 1640 Selva morale and the posthumous 1650 Messa e salmi), surrounded by hymns by Monteverdi, Cozzolani, and Giovanni Gabrieli. At this year’s performance … <Read More>
Excellent New York Polyphony
My experience thus far with the male vocal quartet New York Polyphony has been that they are always excellent. Tonight’s concert at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in NY’s Times Square presented by Miller Theatre at Columbia University was no exception, all expectations met.
New York Polyphony consists of Geoffrey Williams (countertenor), Steven Caldicott Wilson (tenor), Christopher Dylan Herbert (baritone), and Craig Phillips (bass). They sing Renaissance polyphony like it was composed just … <Read More>
American Symphony Explores Works of the 1880s at Carnegie Hall
Leon Botstein, the music director and conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra for the past twenty years, has emphasized thematic programming in constructing the orchestra’s concert schedule. There is always a thematic link of some sort between the pieces presented in a multi-piece program, and most of the orchestra’s annual Vanguard Series in New York City consists of such programs. Last night at Carnegie Hall, the theme was “What Makes a Masterpiece.” Botstein offered performances … <Read More>
Radu Lupu at Carnegie Hall – January 24, 2013
I attended Radu Lupu’s piano recital at Carnegie Hall last night. This was a long evening. The program started (late as per Carnegie’s custom these days) at about 8:10 pm, and wasn’t over, including the single brief encore, until close to 10:30 pm. I have no objection to longer-than-usual piano recitals, but I found this one a bit wearying.
And that was because Mr. Lupu’s program seemed to me to be too much focused on … <Read More>
A Baritone’s Progress – Jesse Blumberg
One of my favorite singers is baritone Jesse Blumberg. I first heard him sing at a Wolf recital at the Austrian Cultural Forum many years ago. I had gone because another singer who had recently attracted my attention, Tom Meglioranza, was on the program. I came away from the event a Blumberg fan as well, and began to look out for his other concert appearances. Over the past month, I’ve attended three of them!
On … <Read More>
A Busy Saturday in NYC: Metropolitan Opera’s “Maria Stuarda” and New York Philharmonic in Brahms and Sibelius
I had a busy musical Saturday, attending an afternoon performance of Gaetano Donizetti’s “Maria Stuarda” at the Metropolitan Opera and an evening performance by the New York Philharmonic.
The Metropolitan was broadcasting the Donizetti opera live to movie theaters worldwide in high definition video, so one had to put up with the cameras-in-motion that can occasionally be distracting in the house. On the plus-side, perhaps, is that the performers, conscious of being broadcast, may be … <Read More>
Countertenor Alerts: Jaroussky, Roth Costanzo and Barna-Sabadus
The rising tide of exciting new countertenors is one of the most important offshoots of the early music movement.
My favorite among the young countertenors is Philippe Jaroussky. I’ve heard him perform at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall with Christina Pluhar and L’Arpeggiata. I’ve been avidly collecting his recordings for several years now. Most recently, Virgin Classics has issued a DVD collecting excerpts from video recordings of his concert appearances in France and Germany — many of … <Read More>
Soldier Songs at Prototype Festival
Tonight’s performance of David T. Little’s one-act opera-song-cycle Soldier Songs at the Prototype Festival (presented at Schimmel Center at Pace University) was stunning! Little and director Yuval Sharon have created a high impact examination of the mind of a combat soldier, aptly portrayed by Christopher Burchett with the assistance of Zac Ballard, a child actor, as “The Boy.”
This is overwhelmingly powerful stuff – so powerful, in its combination of music, light, projections, interview snippets, … <Read More>
A brief diary of my 4th quarter 2012 cultural activities
Blogging about my cultural activities lapsed during the fall 2012 semester, due to a combination of being too busy on my part and the transitioning of my blog from typepad to wordpress. This posting is a sort of “catch-up” on the events I’ve attended during the last quarter of 2012 about which I haven’t had a chance to blog. I’ll list them in chronological order with brief comments.
October began with the Metropolitan Opera’s new … <Read More>