Sydney Boyd is an arts writer, scholar, and violinist. She has been a music critic in Houston since 2012 and is the blog author of Girl at the Opera. She has a Ph.D. in English literature from Rice University, where she currently holds a post-doctoral Spatial Studies fellowship in the Humanities Research Center.
With a world premiere by Peter Boyer and a stunning Beethoven piano concerto deftly played by Lang Lang, the evening didn’t fail to strike a poignantly significant chord.
Christian Tetzlaff proves once again why audiences can’t get enough of his sound in a program of Dvořák and Schumann with Christoph Eschenbach at the helm.
In a failed mash-up, the Houston Symphony performed only the first movement (the three-minute “Prelude: Maestoso”) of Ives’ Fourth Symphony and continued attacca into the 80 minutes of Mahler's "Resurrection."
Houston Symphony’s program starring John Corigliano’s Conjurer: Concerto for Percussionist and String Orchestra and Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé crept through mists.
When a hurricane floods your symphony hall, and you have to scrap and replace programs according to new venues and limited rehearsal time – all with an aim to soothe a city in distress – what do you play?
In a program with Chabrier’s España and Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat, the Houston Symphony ambitiously unearthed Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Cello Concerto, last heard at its premiere with the New York Philharmonic in 1935.
On a program with unusually slow tempos in Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony and Mendelssohn’s The Hebrides, Argentine pianist Ingrid Fliter gave a cursory performance of Mendelssohn's First Piano Concerto.
While passion, supreme technical mastery, and inspiration all come to mind watching a celebrity like Ma perform, camaraderie, perhaps, is the best word for this concert.
