Karen WeinsteinLos Angeles,
Call it a chestnut or a war horse, if you must, in order to polish your sophistication credentials. “La Bohème,” done well, is some of the most moving music on an opera stage. It is ...
Lewis WhittingtonPhiladelphia,
The Philadelphia Orchestra performs every summer at the Mann Center in Fairmount Park, but on June 24 it would be the first time musical director Yannick Nezet-Seguin would on the podium at the open-air venue. And he made it ...
Karen Weinstein
How you feel about the Marta Domingo production of La Traviata will probably be influenced by what you think about moving an opera from the original setting to another time period. Verdi wrote his blockbuster ...
Lewis WhittingtonPhiladelphia,
The Jazz Orchestra of Philadelphia was back in Verizon Hall with a concert built around an instrument not usually a part of the orchestration in big band jazz repertory, namely, the pipe organ. But bandleader Terell Stafford proved what ...
Michael McDonaghBerkeley,
The Philharmonia has been called one of the best orchestras in the world and its principal conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen may be one of our top living ones, so pairing a master work by the Russian Igor ...
Michael McDonaghBerkeley,
Pianists and violinists are the prime donne of classical music so where does that leave Damascus, Syria-born clarinetist Kinan Azmeh who makes his instrument sing with his own breath? One doesn't think of clarinetists as ...
Karen WeinsteinLos Angeles,
If you are feeling jaded by seeing too many Bohemes, Butterflies, and Carmens, but are unable to cuddle up to late 20th and 21st century works, you should definitely give LA Opera’s ...
Piano four hands Shostakovich transcriptions of Stravinsky " Symphony of Psalms " and Shostakovich "Symphony No. 4 "
Michael McDonaghSan Francisco,
Piano reductions of symphonies were a hard sell in the twentieth century and still are in our twenty-first century but that wasn't the case in the nineteenth century when reductions of symphonies ...
Michael McDonaghSan Francisco,
We like to that think music is easy as pie. Composers hear it in their heads, write it down, have it played, and all the audience has to do is listen. ...
Lewis WhittingtonPhiladelphia,
When trumpeter Terell Stafford conducts the Jazz Orchestra of Philadelphia the stellar big jazz band he founded, he picks up his horn for some brief solos, but sounding as warm as if he had been ...
