Amanda Keil is a native New Yorker who sings, teaches, writes about music and fundraises for the arts. Her broad musical interests have led her to perform music from ancient to modern times, and she is the founder of Musica Nuova, which stages Baroque songs in modern settings. She blogs at thousandfoldecho.
The Philadelphia Orchestra was visibly enjoying their evening at Carnegie Hall with Sir Simon Rattle, their frequent guest conductor who nearly became their music director. In a program of early modern classics and a perennial Beethoven favorite, energy and spirits were high and in good supply.
The Wagner bicentennial marches on, bringing grand sounds from practically every corner of the musical earth. What appear most frequently on concert programs are various extracts from the operas, such as the collection of preludes, overture, and vocal and orchestral excerpts offered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Daniele Gatti at Carnegie Hall.
When Alice Tully, the great New York patron of the arts, commissioned a work from Olivier Messiaen to celebrate the American bicentennial, the French composer packed up his sketchbooks and headed West. He found inspiration in the unearthly beauty of Utah’s national parks, among the brilliantly colored landscapes of canyons, cliffs, rock pillars, and arches. Des canyons aux étoiles...
With so much of the chamber repertoire focused on strings and piano, it was a refreshing choice by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center to open their season with some of the great works for winds.
A successful performance of Steve Reich’s music requires performers with stamina, a groove, and an audience willing to come along for the ride. The music itself is at its best when Reich layers gesture on top of gesture, creating a complex rhythmic tapestry that can put listeners into a trance and trigger unexpected emotions.
“I put into your hands manuscripts that I very much wish will remain after me,” wrote Émilie du Châtelet shortly before the birth of her fourth child in 1749. “I hope... that my lying-in, which I am expecting at any moment, will not be fatal, as I fear.” Her fears did prove fatal, and she died days after giving birth, at the age of 42.
A concert juxtaposing masters and lesser-knowns can have two effects: it can illustrate the genius of the master, or it can unveil an unjustly neglected gem. New York Philharmonic’s recent offering accomplished both. The combination of Beethoven, Korngold, and Nielsen spanned a huge swath of what is loosely called Romantic music, demonstrating the peaks and valleys possible in the style.
The loosely-affiliated Metropolitan Museum Artists in Concert, now in its ninth season at the museum, illustrates all that is good about music-making among friends – and even family members. Two sets of siblings and numerous old friends were on stage for a concert of music inspired by the completion of the museum’s new wing of American art.
Magnus Lindberg’s music draws upon the idioms of the classical canon, even as it exploits the myriad innovations and stylistic resources available to contemporary composers. His Piano Concerto no. 2, given its world premiere by the New York Philharmonic on this program, flits between key signatures rather than staying rooted in strict atonality.
The Philadelphia Orchestra may be in the news more often for its financial difficulties than for its music-making, but even a fleeting listen to one of their concerts demonstrates that the ensemble remains one of America’s gems.
You have to hand it to Philip Glass: 75 years old and a career on fire. And even more remarkable are the simple musical elements that made that career: the oscillating thirds, the arpeggios, and the basic melodic motifs that have entranced a vast spectrum of listeners. New York has seen a flurry of concerts to fete the hometown composer in his 75th year.
Enter the sound world of Quatuor Mosaïques and check your expectations at the door. They perform on what we call period instruments: gut strings (rather than steel), classical bows (shorter than their modern counterparts), and less tension in the instruments.
The collaborative duo Leimay promised Floating Point Waves to be “a performance experience of solo dance, real-time video, live electronic music, water and kinetic sculptures,” and they delivered.
Bravo to Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony for blowing the dust off of some of the boldest innovators America has produced. As part of a mini-festival at Carnegie Hall of 20th- and 21st-century composers who stretched musical and formal boundaries (to put it mildly), the program on Tuesday night was packed with rarely-played wonders.
If only every orchestral concert were as thoughtfully programmed as the Saint Louis Symphony’s last Saturday. David Robertson led his orchestra in Debussy’s Printemps, an ingratiating early work; the Carnegie Hall premiere of Quatre Instants by Kaija Saariaho with the irrepressible soprano Karita Mattila; and the full-length version of Stravinsky’s Firebird.
Good news for skeptics: modernist music can be beautiful. If what keeps listeners away from the “difficult” music written in the past century is a fear of dissonance, they can rest assured.
Throngs of the well-dressed faithful came for their periodic worship of the Vienna Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall on Friday night. Lorin Maazel led the players in a backwards tour of three Sibelius symphonies, beginning with the single-movement Seventh, moving on to the inimitable Fifth, and ending with the more traditional First.
To paraphrase Richard Strauss’ advice to young conductors: “If you think the brass are playing too soft, ask them to play softer.” Manfred Honeck, music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony, clearly thinks that the brass can never play loudly enough.
To see Fretwork perform live is to understand the difference between virtuosos playing together for the first time, and virtuosos playing together who know how their colleagues take their coffee.
Bluish lights mottled the stage at Merkin Concert Hall. The space was set for what appeared to be an orchestral concert, but for the table, drum set, and microphones. At the 7:30 start time the vintage-clad crowd was still in the lobby sipping wine, or ambling into the hall as if going to a rock concert.
