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.
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.
Baráti and Würtz quickly showed their adeptness turning Beethoven’s quick lines into easy gestures. Together, they understand the meaning of the phrase, the weight of good articulation, and the importance of the space between notes.
