July 13, 2017

in: Reviews

Trifonov Wows Crowd

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Coming with impressive credentials, Daniil Trifonov made his Tanglewood debut last night with Schumann, Shostakovitch and Stravinsky.    [continued]

July 11, 2017

in: Reviews

Vermont Is Not So Far

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Dateline Putney on Friday: At Yellow Barn, a (taped) baby fusses and gurgles in its crib as a baroque violin tenderly hovers with fragments of antique chorales and lullabies in a copacetic gathering of sunny youth.    [continued]

July 11, 2017

in: Reviews

Spektral Challenges and Familiar Affirmation

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The Spektral Quartet made its Maverick debut with an unusual program consisting of 3/4 unfamiliar music along with the Ravel.    [continued]

July 10, 2017

in: Reviews

Deveau’s Graceful Finale

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Sunday at Rockport outgoing AD David Deveau bade farewell after 22 leaderly years, with fond and good vibrations all round.    [continued]

July 9, 2017

in: Reviews

Pianist Rewards with Narrative Warmth

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Garrick Ohlsson found unexpected variety within his unlikely pairing of Schubert and Scriabin at Rockport on Thursday.    [continued]

July 8, 2017

in: Reviews

Nelsons Leads Tanglewood Resurrection

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The Boston Symphony Orchestra gave Gustav a 150th-birthday present in the Tanglewood 2017 opener.    [continued]

July 5, 2017

in: Reviews

Going, Going … But Not Gone

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David Deveau’s directorial Schwanengesang at the Rockport Chamber Music Festival found him sitting with the Boston Symphony Chamber Players in the first of three concerts to close his era at the RCMF.    [continued]

July 4, 2017

in: Reviews

Escher = Impulse, Sheen, Variety

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The Escher String Quartet fused into a single 16-stringed instrument at the Maverick on Sunday.      [continued]

July 2, 2017

in: Reviews

Madrigals for String Quartet: Without Words

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The Brentano String Quartet performed Gesualdo, Hartke, and Beethoven with imagination and dazzling assurance on Saturday at the Rockport Chamber Music Festival.    [continued]

July 1, 2017

in: Reviews

Quint Essential Wind Divertissements

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New York Woodwind Quintet lofted a balanced potpourri of between-the-wars classics as kids splashed in the Shalin Liu vista on Thursday.    [continued]

June 26, 2017

in: Reviews

Bravura Entertainment from Albright

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A restless and romantic Charlie Albright channeled fun at the Shalin Liu Performance Center, Sunday afternoon.      [continued]

June 26, 2017

in: Reviews

Sirens Ranged Widely

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Lorelei Ensemble’s truly astounding sound reliably elicited pleasure for the Rockport crowd on Friday.    [continued]

June 25, 2017

in: Reviews

Integrity Prevailed. Musicianship Abounded.

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German violinist Katharina Giegling and Ukrainian pianist Anastasia Seifetdinova played Mozart, Mendelssohn, Beethoven, and Brahms very satisfyingly at First Baptist Church Medford yesterday.    [continued]

June 25, 2017

in: Reviews

Almost Completely Wonderful Dvořák

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Dvořák Quartets played by the superb Miró Quartet in the lovely surroundings of the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock was blissful Sunday.    [continued]

June 25, 2017

in: Reviews

Mugging, Stomping, and Singing

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At the Maverick Saturday, ETHEL fused the string quartet with the rock band, resulting in some very un-string quartet behavior.    [continued]

June 23, 2017

in: Reviews

Naumberg Medalists’ Trio at RCMF

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A strong but inconsistently named piano trio brought splendidly varied music most audiences will not have heard very much to Shalin Liu Center on Thursday.    [continued]

June 20, 2017

in: Reviews

Il San Vito Premieres for Moderns

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Concerto Romano gave the modern day premiere of Il San Vito by Bernardo Pasquini last Wednesday afternoon at Emmanuel Church in Boston under the umbrella of the Boston Early Music Festival.    [continued]

June 20, 2017

in: Reviews

So Many Keys to the Past, II

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A second BEMF keyboard mini-festival took us on further time-travels last Friday courtesy of the Boston Museum of Fine Art’s historic instruments.    [continued]

June 19, 2017

in: Reviews

Medalist Comes Home

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Pianist George Li, the celebrated silver medalist from the last Tchaikovsky Competition, showed astonishing prowess at Walnut Hill School for the Performing Arts Saturday night.    [continued]

June 19, 2017

in: Reviews

Ensemble Correspondances Stunning in Charpentier

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Under director Sébastien Daucé, 17th-century French sacred music specialist Ensemble Correspondances debuted for the Boston Early Music Festival on June 13th at Jordan Hall. “Motets for the House of Guise” featured music by Marc-Antoine Charpentier.    [continued]

June 19, 2017

in: Reviews

Escher and Yang Leave Us Breathless

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The Escher String Quartet, one of the leading young quartets making the rounds, teamed up on Friday with pianist Joyce Yang, a Cliburn silver medalist, in a thoroughly satisfying program of Russian music at Rockport’s Shalin Liu Performance Center.    [continued]

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July 12, 2017

in: News & Features

Yellow Barn Opens Wide Its Doors

by

Seth Knopp

Yellow is the color of the sun, daisies, corn. Yellow equates with hope, happiness, lucidity. It signifies energy, optimism, enlightenment — and remembrance. There’s a yellow barn in Putney, Vermont that’s home to a summer chamber music school and festival. Putney has proven fertile ground for apple orchards and progressive thinking since the 1840s: witness the Bible Communist movement, Putney School’s animal husbandry approach to college prep, and Landmark College’s unique niche for the learning disabled. Yellow Barn, an egalitarian community of students and professionals gathered to mine the rich heritage of chamber works from Baroque to Brooklyn, fits right in with Putney’s Yankee grit and edgy determination. Chugging steadfastly towards 50 since its founding as an artists’ retreat by NEC cellist David Wells in 1969, Yellow Barn ‘just growed’ from the Wells’ farmhouse summer jams into an ideally intimate environment for creative music and contemporary expression.

First, the people: Seth Knopp, artistic director since 1998, is a pianist and educator at Peabody Institute and founder of The Peabody Trio. Knopp wrote in a recent YB manifesto: [continued…]

July 10, 2017

in: News & Features

Dramatizing Shostakovich

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The young Dmitri

The Emerson String Quartet will collaborate with seven actors in a new theatrical realization, “Shostakovich and The Black Monk: A Russian Fantasy” at the Seiji Ozawa Hall on Wednesday, July 19th at 8 PM. Co-commissioned by Tanglewood Music Festival, the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival and Princeton University Concerts, the concept premiered at the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival on last month. James Glossman, wrote and directed this timely and interesting discourse on the suppressive influence on culture in Stalin’s Russia. A fantasy based on Shostakovich’s 50-year obsession with creating an opera from Anton Chekhov’s short story, “The Black Monk,” this musical play treats the composer’s life-long struggle for freedom and sanity against his own demons. Described by James Glossman as a “Valentine to the human spirit,” it reflects on the sarcastic Russian reactions which often inspired Shostakovich.

The writer-adapter and the founding violinist from the quartet both responded to our questions.

BMInt: Phil, how did this project come about?

Philip Setzer: Chekhov wrote, “When a person is born, he can embark on only one of three roads in life: if you go to the right, the wolves will eat you; if you go left, you’ll eat the wolves; if you go straight, you’ll eat yourself.”  This is a perfect description of the life of Dmitri Shostakovich, as well as the character Kovrin in Chekhov’s story, “The Black Monk.” [continued…]

July 3, 2017

in: News & Features

Newport Festival Ends Era

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One year shy of its 50th anniversary, the Newport Music Festival has disclosed that the family behind its operation since 1975 will cease to be involved following the conclusion of this season.

Artistic Director Mark Malkovich IV, and his 85-year-old mother, Joan Malkovich, an invisible but potent force in the office, recently announced their retirements a year before the celebratory anniversary season that they had been enthusiastically touting only a couple of weeks earlier.

While he was not the founder of the enterprise, paterfamilias Mark Malkovich III transformed it to an international extravaganza. Papers of record such as the New York Times and the Boston Globe took frequent note of the imaginative programming of unjustly neglected romantic chamber music in robber-baronial venues, and celebrated the debuts of both young and legendary artists anointed by M3. [continued…]

June 25, 2017

in: News & Features

Musical Intelligence in Antebellum Boston:

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John Sullivan Dwight

After having participated recently in a scholarly gathering on 19th-century journalism, your publisher takes great pleasure in sharing with readers three papers and a response that summon the era of the Intelligencer’s unwitting antecedents. The presence of thoughtful essays on these pages echoes the intentions of John Sullivan Dwight, whose Journal of Music inspired this journal.

Reviewers, Audiences and Performing Styles

By Robert J. Scholnick

“Musical Intelligence in Antebellum Boston” was the title of a lively session held on Thursday, May 25, 2017 at the annual meeting of the American Literature Association in Boston. Sponsored by the Research Society for American Periodicals, the session considered two questions: just how did the press—both popular and elite—help to create audiences for classical music and to what extent did press criticism shape performance styles? Three papers were presented, and they complemented each other in compelling ways. Teresa M. Neff of MIT, and Christopher Hogwood HIP Fellow Handel and Haydn Society, demonstrated just how in the 1840s the fabled Handel and Haydn Society, facing poor reviews and declining audiences, came to revamp its repertory, its leadership, and performance style, beginning in 1845 with its highly successful performances of Handel’s Samson, an American premier. The press took immediate notice, as Robert J. Scholnick of William and Mary, writing about music criticism in the Boston Post, makes clear. The paper’s music critic, George Washington Peck, published several highly appreciative articles on Samson, contributing to a successful run for H+H’s production.  In “Not for Whigs or Transcendentalists Alone: Music Criticism in Charles Gordon Greene’s Boston Post,” Scholnick considers the way that Peck used the resources of this “penny paper” to introduce new readers classical music, helping to build audiences. In “The ‘yearnings of the heart to the Infinite’: The Dial and Transcendentalist Music Criticism,” Wesley Mott of WPI explores the “composite picture of the Transcendentalist moral aesthetic” as reflected in the searching music criticism of Margaret Fuller, the pioneering feminist critic, and John Sullivan Dwight, the great Boston music critic. Although the circulation of the Dial was modest, these writers helped to lay the foundation for a growing appreciation for instrumental music in Boston and beyond. In her commentary, the session’s chair and commentator, Katherine K. Preston of William and Mary’s Department of Music, welcomed the perspective of the non-musicologists on the panel (Scholnick and Mott), and spoke of the opportunities for continuing research in this area. It is an especially important subject today, when important newspapers, including the New York Times, are reducing their coverage of classical music. Responding to all four speakers, Lee Eiseman of the Intelligencer focused in particular on the activities of the Harvard Music Association and Dwight’s Journal of Music, not only in promoting and sponsoring musical organizations in Boston over the course of the 19th century, but also in supporting music education in the public schools. He also noted how , Dwight the critic could have tremendous influence on taste, through Dwight the presenter. All four panelists—and a large and enthusiastic audience—offered a hearty round of applause to Eiseman and his associates on the Boston Musical Intelligencer for their invaluable work in bringing intelligent discussion about music to contemporary Boston, thereby helping to create audiences and shape performance styles.                               

Clicking at the end of the lead paragraphs from the four following articles will link to the complete papers. [continued…]

June 17, 2017

in: News & Features

High Cs at Twenty Paces

by

David Gvinianidze

Newton becomes Nürnberg for a night as Meistersingers duel for artistic gold rings (Niebelungen beware). An audience of Hans Sachs manqués attempting to tilt the decibel meter for their favorites at Newton Highlands Congregational Church (and again at Mechanics Hall in Worcester) will witness contests of glass-shattering and wallpaper-stripping from a cohort of Russian and Ukrainian baritones and tenors armed for bear. Additionally, two prima donnas promise to provide inspiration, color, and relief. Voices and egos will be large, but so too should be the artistic rewards for those with big appetites.

To provide a chivalrous  joust to settle matters involving honor, love, and musical chops, David Gvinianidze has authored this musical contest between the two male vocal timbres involving larynxes at close range, with attendant bantering and bellowing. Yelena Beriyeva, virtuoso pianist from Georgia, will preside at the piano while dodging the high notes.

In the tenor ring, Adam Klein, USA (Metropolitan Opera); Raúl Melo, Cuba (Metropolitan Opera); Benjamin Sloman, Australia (Sydney Lyric Theater); and from the baritone cage David Gvinianidze, Georgia (New Opera Moscow Theater); Anton Belov, Russia (Portland Opera); and Vasil Kolkhidashvili, Georgia (New York City Opera) will all demonstrate prowess in tournaments from opera to operetta to Neapolitan song and folksong. Prizes will come with the colors of beloved damosels Ukrainian coloratura Olga Lisovskaya (of Commonwealth Lyric Theater among others) and Canadian soprano Christine Petkus. [continued…]

June 13, 2017

in: News & Features

Noli to Opera Company: Mount Me

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José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda

Why stage the totally obscure Noli Me Tangere in the Strand Theater of Dorchester in these days of dramatically truncated arts funding with opera companies folding almost every month? For me, opera, albeit expensive, remains essential, particularly when some compelling lyric theater is forthcoming. 

The co-producers, Opera Brittenica of Boston and KGB Productions of Chicago have very different missions. The former, better known to Bostonians for bringing attention to, and producing imaginative and unique performances of the music of English language composers, specifically Benjamin Britten, and also to promote the interests and social agenda that Britten held dear. KGB Productions and the Mid Atlantic Foundation for Asian Artists (MAFFAA) are dedicated to bringing Asian art and culture to both Asian and non-Asian audiences in the United States.

So, how do these two seemingly incompatible mission statements intersect? Britten was a life-long pacifist and wrote a great many important works on the subject of alienation and reaching out to underserved global populations. He took a great deal of interest in music of the Far East as a result of Britten’s and Pears’s extensive travels in the South Pacific. In particular, he had a distinct affinity for the Balinese gamelan, as exemplified in his ballet The Prince of the Pagodas, written for Sadler’s Wells Ballet (1957). Britten also wrote a short song cycle for tenor and guitar in the same year called Songs from the Chinese, another Asian influence, though the songs are in English much as Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde is written in German after Chinese poetry. [continued…]

June 11, 2017

in: News & Features

BPYO Previews South American Tour

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Elmer Churampi, trumpet (Paul Marotta photo)

About a month ago the Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra decided to add an extra concert that unfortunately has flown under the usual concert listing radar. Anyone at Sanders Theater on Monday at 8:00 will find the orchestra giving itself a send-off gala to demonstrate its touring wares before impressing the capitals of Peru, Argentina and Uruguay. For this writer, the story is how conductor Benjamin Zander is making of the Franck D Minor something of a resurrection symphony in a free concert that also includes Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphosis and Arutiunian: Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra.

For Zander the talking point is the latest success of one of his young players.

“Twenty-year-old Elmer Churampi, who just made the final round (one of three finalists) for the first trumpet position in the Pittsburgh Symphony, is probably the best trumpet player of his age in America today. Everyone is talking about him. He won the NEC school wide concerto competition and will be playing the same concerto with the Pops next season. We haven’t seen a trumpet talent like that hereabouts for quite a while. [continued…]

June 9, 2017

in: News & Features

Terra Incognita and Firma: Ayreheart and Kings

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Lutenist Ronn Macfalrane

At every biennial Boston Early Music Festival, new groups join the roster of the familiar and popular regulars. This year, Ayreheart debuts with Renaissance music from the British Isles. The ensemble of four was born out of Grammy-nominated lutenist Ronn McFarlane’s desire to feature his instrument, to “write new music for the lute, the most popular instrument of the Renaissance, and make it accessible to a wider audience. My first compositions were conceived as solos. But I was soon writing music that could not be fully expressed on solo lute and I needed musician friends to help realize the music. Willard Morris and Mattias Rucht teamed up with me first. Then in 2013 Brian Kay joined us and the band was complete. Together we perform our own original music as well as Renaissance music from the time of Shakespeare.” But it is hardly necessary to convince BEMF attendees of the worthiness of lute music with or without, colascione, hand percussion, and vocalists. Ayreheart also performs Renaissance concerts with voice, two lutes, colascione (a kind of bass lute) and hand percussion.

 “Renaissance masters like John Dowland and William Byrd had no qualms about appropriating popular folk music of the era, and Ayreheart follows their example,” McFarlane explains, “fusing Renaissance tunes with influences from contemporary folk and bluegrass traditions. The resulting sound is thoroughly unique and provides a point of entry for modern audiences to hear for themselves why Renaissance writers called the lute ‘the Prince of Instruments.’” [continued…]

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