NEW YORK – Founded 30 years ago by pianists Steven Blier and Michael Barrett, the New York Festival of Song has become fundamental to the city’s vocal scene. Seven singers of varied temperament took part in the anniversary.
NEW YORK – An ambitious project by bel canto tenor Lawence Brownlee to explore the real-life experience of being a black man in today's America pushes too hard to give the poetry of poet Terrance Hayes extra weight.
NEW YORK - How times have changed for 81-year-old Philip Glass. An outsider spurned by the establishment in the early 1970s, the composer’s vast output and its impact were on display all season long at the epicenter of American music.
DIGITAL REVIEW – The Clarion Quartet was formed to perform ‘Entartete Musik’ that was suppressed by the Nazis. Breaking the Silence, the group’s new album, resulted from a concert it gave at Terezín concentration camp.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The 2018 SHIFT Festival threw its spotlight on four diverse U.S. orchestras whose musical reach extended from the Kennedy Center to the corners of the nation’s capital – even to a concert at Union Station.
VICTORIA, B.C. – Pacific Opera Victoria closed its season with a mainstream production of Rinaldo, stylish but eclectic. It set out to charm. But did the storybook staging square with the
intensity of Handel’s music?
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The SHIFT Festival of orchestras concluded with a performance by music director Gianandrea Noseda, right, and the National Symphony Orchestra in tribute to the late Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky.
LOS ANGELES – What can you do when you have to replace an entire program of new music with another on short notice? The L.A. Philharmonic seemed to have no problem cobbling one together for a Green Umbrella concert.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Under the energetic leadership of music director David Alan Miller, the Albany Symphony's program at the Kennedy Center on April 11 focused on new American music with adult and children's choruses.
LOS ANGELES - Though he may still be playing composer catch-up since stepping down as music director of the LA Phil in 2009, Esa-Pekka Salonen's new Pollux, given under Gustavo Dudamel, showed his compositional flair.
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Concerts of wildly divergent character, by equally dissimilar ensembles, showed the bold range of SHIFT: A Festival of American Orchestras, an effort of Washington Performing Arts and the Kennedy Center.
NEW YORK – Sometimes an opera's absurdity must be embraced before its genius is apparent. New York City Opera did this for Montemezzi's 1913 L'amore dei tre re, which stands among operas with great music and near-hopeless librettos.
NEW YORK – A French-speaking Cinderella rode her coach onto the Metropolitan Opera stage for the first time on April 12, when a superb Joyce DiDonato sang the title role in the Met's belated debut of Massenet’s 1899 opera.
WASHINGTON, D.C. ‒ Music and dance were handsomely made one as Anna Clyne's Rift, choreographed by Kitty McNamee, kicked off the 2018 SHIFT festival convening orchestras from Fort Worth, Albany, Indianapolis, and D.C.
BREAKING NEWS – The 2018 MCANA Award for Best New Opera in North America goes to The Wake World by composer/librettist David Hertzberg. Opera Philadelphia staged the premiere at the Barnes Foundation.
BOSTON - In concert, Andris Nelsons conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra with a fine cast of soloists featuring tenor Jonas Kaufmann and soprano Camilla Nylund in the title roles with mezzo-soprano Mihoko Fujimura as Brangäne.
LOS ANGELES – LA Phil artist-collaborator Yuval Sharon's joint conception of Das Lied von der Erde with Juan Carlos Zagal's Chilean theatre troupe Teatrocinema was a treat for the eye, but credit also goes to conductor Gustavo Dudamel.
DIGITAL – Belatedly confronting Nielsen's quirky Third and Fourth Symphonies on CD, fellow Dane Thomas Dausgaard further displays his close musical relationship with his future orchestra, the Seattle Symphony.
BOOK REVIEW – New books by two American senior statesman conductors – John Mauceri is 72 and Leonard Slatkin, 73 – take contrasting approaches, drawing insights from highly successful careers at home and abroad.
NEW YORK – The world premiere of Christopher Cerrone’s A Natural History of Vacant Lots, for percussion quartet and electronics, offered an illuminating example of the composer’s exploration of soundscapes.
