Uncategorized

Toronto’s classical music scene has a lot going for it. But one thing that’s never been established here is an ongoing international piano competition. Back in 1985, the Bach International Piano Competition was launched with great fanfare. Unfortunately, it proved to be a one-off event. However, its first-prize winner, Angela Hewitt, achieved a distinguished international career – thereby endowing the ephemeral event with a 100 percent success rate, in terms of selecting laureates who go places. In the first week of

Franz Liszt’s Totentanz gets a bad press. This extravaganza of variations on the Dies Irae for piano and orchestra has been called “a ridiculously overblown piece of boom-boom music” by one critic, and larded with “heavy-footed exhibitionism” by another. For a would-be pianist like me, however, it’s more than a just guilty pleasure to experience it in concert: It is so full of unabashed key banging and jaw-dropping pyrotechics that it amounts to aural-visual primal-scream therapy. 

Review: Orchestre de Paris, Paavo Jarvi conducting; Elisabeth Leonskaya, piano, at the Salle Pleyel, Paris Each time I’ve heard the Orchestre de Paris on its home turf in recent years, I’ve wondered why this fine ensemble typically does not come up in conversations about the world’s great orchestras. In any case, whether because it doesn’t visit the United States very often or its recordings are unfamiliar to us, American critics seem to undervalue the Orchestre de Paris. I find it

    After living without a TV for most of my adult life I've recently become quite addicted to the Tube. An American who doesn't follow sports, I still don't own a set at home, but in France I turn the thing on as soon as the alarm goes off. TF2's  morning show, Telematin, helps me start each day in French, and to fill in time between weather and news bulletins the program runs segments that clue me in to cultural goings on in Paris and elsewhere in the Hexagon. After

  Il Trittico just completed its first run in Paris since 1987, and its very first appearance at Opéra Nationale de Paris, in Luca Ronconi's coproduction from La Scala. I thought it a mixed success: the spare, semi-abstract staging, lacked Puccini's signal specificity of place and looked even cheaper in the opera house than it did in La Scala's cinema broadcast. But it was a rare opportunity for Parisian audiences to see the trilogy, and some felicitous casting redeemed a not-so-exciting evening.

Review: Orchestre de Paris, Andris Nelsons conducting; pianist Michaela Ursuleasa. Salle des Concerts, Cité de la Musique, Paris Latvian conductor Andris Nelsons’ intriguing program with the Orchestre de Paris on Oct. 29 featured two works with philosophical overtones by Richard Strauss, the late “Metamorphosen” for 23 strings and the opulently orchestrated “Also sprach Zarathustra,” written nearly 50 earlier.

Review: Chekhov’s “The Seagull” at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago Occasionally, the manifestation of a great theater company can rival the brilliance of the play at hand. Case in point: the Goodman Theatre’s thoroughly rewarding production of Chekhov’s “The Seagull.” Viewed from any perspective – director Robert Falls’ uncluttered concept, designer Todd Rosenthal’s barely adorned deep-thrust  stage, the uniformly fluent and specific

Michael Steinberg’s program notes declared: 

The Symphony No. 1 is the culmination of Walton’s conquest of maturity. One can make a strong case that this music is at a level of compositional ambition, concentration, and sheer human urgency and strength that Walton would not reach again.

 As I heard the music for the first time live in the San Francisco Symphony’s Davies Hall last Saturday, I agreed with the late and marvelous annotator, except that I would add

    I'm a bit late weighing in on Das Rheingold at the Met, but after all the brouhaha over the new $45 million high-tech Ring production, it seems that Robert LePage and company have delivered an utterly traditional First Festival Evening in every way that matters. The saga is presented without heavy subtext, other than the PR for the unit set whose weight required costly reinforcement to the Met stage. The rotating girders and interactive projections (the latter used by Le Page to more dramatic effect

Review: Chicago Symphony Orchestra Pierre Boulez, conductor, at Orchestra Hall. It was hard to know what to admire most about the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s eloquent and evocative turn through Mahler’s Seventh Symphony on Oct. 14 at Orchestra Hall: the sheer intellectual virtuosity of the composer, the front-to-back brilliance of the orchestra or the illuminating mastery of conductor Pierre Boulez. However you measure it, this Mahler – a hastily determined replacement for the Cherubini

Review: Bizet’s “Carmen”  at the Lyric Opera of Chicago Bizet’s ever-popular “Carmen” must be the closest thing to a sure-fire winner in the operatic canon. With its alluring anti-heroine and a score replete with great tunes so familiar that most of the audience could sing along, it’s a virtual slam-dunk. Except when it isn’t, quite. Such a rule-proving exception is a revival of the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s “Carmen” that first came to

Review: Shakespeare’s "Romeo and Juliet" at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre The rewards of Chicago Shakespeare Theatre’s “Romeo and Juliet” are substantial, and they take the viewer to rare levels of energy, insight and humanity in what is arguably the most devastating of Shakespeare’s plays. Yet almost as imposing are the problems in this production, which steadily loses focus through the second half, with Ariel Shafir’s bravura Mercurio removed from the picture

Review: David Mamet’s "Oleanna" and "Speed-the-Plow" at American Theatre Company, Chicago You have to love playwright David Mamet’s brand of cynicism. It is unbending, relentless and concise. To which one must add, virtuosic. One helping of Mamet’s dark view of the human spirit invariably requires some time to process, which perhaps explains why the American Theater Company is doing his two short plays “Oleanna” and “Speed-the-Plow” not as a

Review: Edward Albee’s “At Home at the Zoo” at Victory Gardens Biograph Theatre, Chicago Peter and Ann are cruising along in a marital comfort zone. Which means he’s bored and she’s angry – at him. She’s seething, actually, with a feral rage. Ann even fantasizes about regressing into animalistic ferocity. And so Peter retreats further into the ennui of his work as a book editor. Until suddenly, astonishingly, it is he who finds himself with blood on his claws.

Review: Lisa D’Amour’s “Detroit” at Steppenwolf Theatre, Chicago When a new play leaves its author’s hands, it ceases to be a specific private conception and becomes the mutable object of interpretation. Its ever-evolving meaning derives from the experience and insight of the next director­­, cast and audience. I was reminded of this simple truth by the disjunction between my viewing of Lisa D’Amour’s play “Detroit,” in its world premiere run at

Review: Paul Mullin’s “Louis Slotin Sonata”  at A Red Orchid Theatre, Chicago Almost as enduring as the work of nuclear physicist Louis Slotin, who helped to create the first atomic bomb and later pushed that envelope, are the horrific circumstances of his death from radiation poisoning. Slotin, a Canadian whose brilliance won him a place in the Manhattan Project, died in May 1946, at age 35, the result of his own error in a Los Alamos laboratory test that

Most reviews comment on or elaborate on the Pucciniesqueness of Daniel Catán’s new opera, based on the film about the friendship of the poet Pablo Neruda with his postman while exiled on an Italian island. Writers have been comparing it to Tosca and La Boheme. Puccini is given too much credit more deserved by Catán himself, and others. Why? Who?   Reviewers may confuse a thematic similarity too much with a musical one. Catán’s opera, rapturously received by the

While the Chicago Symphony Orchestra waits for some clear sign that all is going to be well with its ailing new music director, Riccardo Muti, CSO patrons – and critics – are having an unexpected adventure with stand-in conductors and unforeseen repertoire. The first such replacement encounter, Oct. 7-9, brought the impressive CSO subscription debut of Israeli conductor Asher Fisch, who kept the program Muti had planned, including an excursion through Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 in E-flat (“Eroica”) that

On October 9 I attended the Canadian Opera Company’s new production of Verdi’s Aida. Indeed, it was a very new production, directed by Tim Albery, with sets and costumes by Hildegard Bechtler and Jon Morrell, respectively. In their hands, Verdi’s ancient Egypt was transplanted to the later 20th century. Was it the 1960s? The 1980s? It was hard to tell. Call it Regietheater or call it Eurotrash – the "updating" of operas has been around for a while now, and it looks like the fashion will

Eye of newt and brilliant singing, wing of bat and stunning sets. Stir in fetching witches, add some oddly flavored staging and you have the steamy cauldron that is Verdi’s “Macbeth” at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. In baritone Thomas Hampson as Macbeth and soprano Nadja Michael as his grasping, murderous wife, the Lyric’s season opener boasts two dramatic voices that could well make Verdi’s concise opera fly on a bare stage. But far from barren, designer James Noone’s sweeping, steely sets embrace