a virtual journal and blog of the classical music scene in Boston
Robert Levin, editor; Bettina A. Norton, executive editor; Lee Eiseman, publisher
August 31, 2010
in: Reviews
BCMS Dispatches Three Classics to End Summer Season
by Lee Eiseman
A near-capacity audience at the Boston Chamber Music Society’s concert at Watertown’s Mosesian Theater on August 28 featured Artistic Director Emeritus and cellist Ronald Thomas with pianist Reiko Aizawa and violinist Steven Copes.
Thomas’s bow arm produced plenty of power in Chopin’s Introduction and Polonaise Brilliant, but pianist Aizawa needs to bump up the decibels as a chamber music partner. In Beethoven’s Sonata for Piano and Violin with violinist Steven Copes, Aizawa again seemed overly deferential.
After a somewhat tentative first movement of Schumann’s Piano Trio in F major op. 80, Thomas got a different bow, complaining that the first bow had even less hair than he did. The three remaining movements were played with great generosity and excitement. [Click title for full review.]
August 29, 2010
in: Reviews
World-class Pianist Joel Fan plus Unimaginative Hagen Première
by Leslie Gerber
Pianist Joel Fan, playing Saturday evening, August 28, at Maverick Concerts, gave impressive, powerful performances of Chopin’s “Funeral March” Sonata and Barber’s Piano Sonata. Fan has tremendous technique and a vivid musical imagination that brought these pieces to life. He also did yeoman work as the left hand soloist in a new chamber orchestra version of Daron Hagen’s 2001 Seven Last Words, ably conducted by Maverick’s Music Director Alexander Platt. The piece itself, however, disappointed with its emphasis of surface attractions over real substance, seeming to reinforce impressions rather than produce them. [Click title for full review.]
August 27, 2010
in: Reviews
Mälkki, with Bell, and Denk, Raises Questions of Tempo and Gender
by Eli Newberger
Both Felix Mendelssohn’s Concerto in D minor for violin, piano, and strings and his Overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” were given dashing interpretations by conductor Susanna Mälkki—the former with violinist Joshua Bell, and pianist Jeremy Denk in the Tanglewood Shed on August 21. Beethoven’s Romance No. 2 in F major for violin and orchestra, with Bell, and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4 in B-flat, Op. 60, offered striking contrasts.
Mälkki expresses ideas and emotions with her fingers, hands, face, hair, torso, and legs.
Wild tempos in the hands of virtuoso players can stir excitement in the absence of great musical substance, and frustration can come when a great orchestra, accustomed to male conductors, faces a woman on its podium. [Click title for full review.]
August 26, 2010
in: Reviews
By and Large Enjoyable Glimmerglass Season
by David Shengold
This 2010 season at Glimmerglass, the fifth and last of Michael MacLeod’s regime, was by and large an enjoyable one. Credit is due to former Director of Casting and Artistic Operations Donald Marrazzo and Donald Eastman, who designed a reasonably attractive set flexible enough to suit four very different works.
The North American professional stage première of Handel’s Tolomeo was undermined by Chas Rader-Shieber’s annoying, derivative, grotesquely supernumerary-marred staging. Musically however, things went swimmingly.
Tender Land, Aaron Copland’s only full-length opera, was an inspired choice for a production utilizing only Young Artists. It was quite a moving evening, thanks to wonderful, unaffected portrayals of the leading character (Laurie Moss, a farm girl) and her mother by Lindsay Russell and Stephanie Foley Davis.
Music Director David Angus did better with an effervescent Nozze di Figaro than with the next day’s decent but hardly “festival” Tosca, though the reduced orchestra played capably enough save for the string colloquy underlying the Cavaradossi/Jailor exchange. Leon Major’s Nozze di Figaro was transposed, seemingly to an Edwardian Britain, but the opera worked, due to a fine cast and inventive, well-timed blocking; my main objection was to the omnipresence onstage of Basilio, who witnessed virtually everything, to no evident gain. One wondered why MacLeod had chosen to mount Tosca in the first place. [Click title for full review.]
August 24, 2010
in: Reviews
Upshaw, Morlot Weave Affecting Textures with BSO
by Eli Newberger
Mozart’s 250-year-old Symphony No. 31 in D was brought to contemporary relevance by a sympathetic conductor, Ludovic Morlot, leading the splendid Boston Symphony Orchestra on August 20 at Tanglewood. Morlot’s “Mother Goose Suite” focused on the kaleidoscopic qualities of Ravel’s orchestration.
World-class soprano Dawn Upshaw’s modest stage manner belied her powerful emotionality and vocal virtuosity, bringing tears to the eyes and cheers to the heart in her knowing evocations of love and loss and the charming intimacies of country life in two moving works, Joseph Canteloube’s Songs of the Auvergne, and Osvaldo Golijov’s Three Songs for Soprano and Orchestra. If there were a perfect singer for the huge emotional range in these works, it was Upshaw. [Click title for full review.]
August 23, 2010
in: Reviews
Generous, Too Lovely, Mixed Blessings at Maverick
by Leslie Gerber
Pianist Fred Hersch, playing a solo jazz recital at Maverick Concerts Saturday evening, displayed beautiful tone and confident technique that would be the envy of many classical pianists. His romantic approach to a variety of jazz and popular tunes, as well as his own originals, eventually sounded like too much of the same thing to one listener, but it was consistent and effective on its own terms. The Ebène Quartet, Sunday afternoon, played works of Mozart and Debussy with exaggerations and mannerisms that called attention to themselves and away from the music. But the same kind of emphatic playing proved very appropriate in a memorable performance of Beethoven’s Quartet, Op. 131. [Click title for full review.]
August 23, 2010
in: Reviews
Voyage of Discovery Finds Less-Known Early-20th-Century American Works
by Lee Eiseman
On August 21, a decommissioned barn at Newburyport’s Maudsley Center for the Arts was the venue for American Century Music. Samuel Barber’s String Quartet, op. 11 got a stirring reading, thanks to the dramatic leadership of first violinist Diaz.
While the ensemble could not always provide the dramatic accents of an established group, their playing did show estimable investment in Piston’s difficult Quintet for Flute and Strings. Foote’s Nocturne and Scherzo for Flute and String Quartet and Gershwin’s Lullaby for String Quartet were followed by a broad and brio performance of Ives’s String Quartet no. 1 “A Revival Service,” a veritable plum pudding of hymns that deserved and received a grateful Amen. [Click title for full review.]
August 23, 2010
in: Reviews
Pearson Headlines in Loeffler, Unfamiliar Mozart and Prokofiev
by Vance R. Koven
The closing concert of this summer’s Portland Chamber Music Festival on August 21 at the University of Southern Maine saw oboist Peggy Pearson in unfamiliar works, though two composers, Mozart and Prokofiev, are household names.
Pearson’s transcription works extremely well and drives home how much substance Mozart has packed into this ostensible trifle, Divertimento in D, K. 136, originally for string quartet. We discovered much greater formal coherence on this hearing of the Loeffler Two Rhapsodies, with Pearson,violist Jessica Thompson, and pianist Dena Levine. The Prokofiev Quintet in G minor is not his most original writing but holds its own with the ‘20s fashion, playful and clever. [Click title for full review.]
August 20, 2010
in: Reviews
Portland’s Competition Winner Between Familiar, Neglected Quintets
by Vance R. Koven
The Portland Chamber Music Festival concert on August 19 featured one familiar and two unfamiliar works — of the latter, one because it is new and the other because it is neglected. The ensemble in the Mozart Clarinet Quintet in A produced rich, sweet sounds, caressing all the notes and achieving admirable sonic blending. Our only reservation had to do with a certain reticence in the strings. We have nothing but commendation for the performance of the Dohnányi Piano Quintet in C minor, op. 1. Andrew List’s Six Bagatelles for String Trio, six little pieces with maximum contrast ranging from “in your face” to “other-worldly,” earned well-deserved applause. [Click title for full review.]
August 20, 2010
in: Reviews
The Joint wuz Jumpin’ with Thibaudet, Spano, Martin
by Eli Newberger
The spirits of “Duke” Ellington, “Count” Basie, “Fats” Waller, and Art Tatum hovered gently over a splendidly satisfying concert in the Tanglewood Shed on August 15. Jazz from the 1920s and 1930s inspired both the afternoon’s composers and Maestro Robert Spano, a fine choice to lead the BSO through the many delights and sensibilities of this quintessentially American music, beginning and ending with the greatest synthesizer of jazz and classics, George Gershwin (An American in Paris and Piano Concerto in F with Jean-Yves Thibaudet, soloist). The other offerings were by the redoubtable composer and jazz scholar Gunther Schuller (Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee) and long-time Tanglewood faculty member Leonard Bernstein (Prelude Fugue and Riffs, with the BSO’s Thomas Martin, soloist.) [Click title for full review.]
September 2, 2010
in: News & Features
Azéma Accorded High French Honor for Role in Arts
by Bettina A. Norton
The Laureate
L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres is not limited to citizens who respect French “civil law” and are over 30; the prestigious organization, established in 1957 and confirmed as part of the Ordre national du Merité by President Charles de Gaulle in 1963, occasionally presents awards to “foreign luminaries.” One of the principal distinctions of France, it is awarded to up to 200 persons a year.
Anne Azéma, the blond-tressed Artistic Director of Boston Camerata, was just designated one of those luminaries, a Chevalier (“Knight”), a “distinction qui rend hommage à vôtre parcours remarquable.” [continued...]
September 1, 2010
in: News & Features
WordSong Experience: New Music in Refreshing Way
by Jonah Kappraff
As I emerged from the elevator on the 8th floor of an elegant office building in Boston’s financial district last winter and found myself in the boardroom of a law firm, I realized that I was not seeing only lawyers. A mix of young professionals, some retirees, and a handful of high school students made up an assembling audience of about 50. Up front were a marimba, cello, and two music stands. I took a seat and began reading In Just–, a poem by e.e. cummings. So began this performance of an interesting collaboration between music and poetry — WordSong.
Composer Howard Frazin starts every WordSong forum by reminiscing about childhood trips to the Art Institute of Chicago, where he remembers entering the Monet gallery in the Impressionist wing and experiencing what he now calls, “The Implicit Conversation.” In this gallery hung seven of Monet’s Haystacks, silently arranged by the curator, and the young Frazin discovered many things about light, color, and shape from interacting with these variations on a theme. Seeing a grouping of paintings on one subject is a unique curatorial gambit that encourages viewers to make comparisons and develop a relationship to the subject itself, in all its incarnations. [continued...]
August 20, 2010
in: News & Features
Critiquing the Critic: The Don Rosenberg Ordeal
by Rebecca Marchand
Let us agree, for the moment, that music criticism (and arts criticism, in general) is, in itself, an art. Certainly it takes a measure of creativity to mold “It stinks….” into:
While we are enjoying the delight of so much science and melody, and eagerly anticipating its continuance, on a sudden, like the fleeting pleasures of life, or the spirited young adventurer, who would fly from ease and comfort at home to the inhospitable shores of New Zealand or Lake Ontario, we are snatched away from such eloquent music, to crude, wild and extraneous harmonies…
This review of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony appeared in 1825, the year after the symphony was completed, in the London Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review; the review is also discussed in Nicolas Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Musical Invective.
While we might chuckle at the historic evaluation of a Beethovenian masterpiece as “crude,” there is certainly no question that the reviewer is engaging in the act of music criticism. The critique is an expression of his opinion — in the above example we learn, in addition to Beethoven’s Ninth, the writer is also not disposed toward the shores of New Zealand.
All this is my opening salvo to, what I hope, is a springboard for further discussion and dialogue surrounding the Donald Rosenberg case. [continued...]
August 9, 2010
in: News & Features
Harbison Adds Musings on Tanglewood’s Upcoming Contemporary Music Festival
by Vance R. Koven
In conversation with BMInt, Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival co-curator John Harbison observed that although a 70th anniversary is not one normally associated with major celebratory events, the idea of having a season that highlights the work of past program directors, faculty, and Fellows had been percolating with Tanglewood management for a while, for a variety of reasons. One was to have a handle by which to extend the TCMF theme through the entire Tanglewood season. There are, he noted, at least as many concerts featuring works by TMC alumni, in the large sense, as there are on the TCMF program itself. This enables Tanglewood to hew more closely, as Harbison put it, to the animating spirit of Serge Koussevitzky of “keeping people in touch with music as it is being written.” [continued...]
August 2, 2010
in: News & Features
BCMS Hamel Summer Series at the Arsenal Center for the Arts
by BMINT STAFF
Boston-area concert-goers may not be aware of another local venue on the concert scene: the Arsenal Center for the Arts in Watertown is yet another location for organizations having to vacate temporarily Pickman Hall at Longy School while it undergoes renovations. Boston Chamber Music Society is holding its 2010 Hamel Summer Series there, in the Charles Mosesian Theater, at 8 pm on each of four Saturdays in August. The series focuses on the music of Chopin and Schumann to commemorate the bicentennial of their births. [continued...]
July 30, 2010
in: News & Features
Portland, Maine for Sounds, Sights, and Other Sensual Pleasures
by Bettina A. Norton
Fiddleheads from PCMF brochure
It’s difficult not to love every bit of the Maine coastline, but Portland holds a special niche. Recently named the number one place in the country to raise children and in the top 10 “perfect places to live in America,” the city experienced a rejuvenation of its downtown waterfront area, with its superb but previously neglected brick mercantile buildings, in the late 1970s. Twenty years later, a summer classical performance series appeared. The Old Port waterfront restaurants, once limited, are now plentiful and in many cases, superb. In toto, it is a delightful place to spend a summer weekend.
The Portland Chamber Music Festival was founded in 1994 by its Executive Director and Artistic-Co director Jennifer Elowitch and Artistic Co-Director Dena Levine. Elowitch, who taught at New England Conservatory Preparatory School (and is still officially still on the faculty) has lived in Maine, her home state, since 2004. But she continues to be involved with the classical music scene in Boston; she is assistant principal second violin with the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra and often subs for the BSO, serves as a faculty member at Longy School of Music and at the Composers’ Conference at Wellesley, and plays with numerous other chamber music groups. [continued...]
July 28, 2010
in: News & Features
At 70, Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival Goes Historical
by Vance R. Koven
As summer music festivals go, the Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival is doubly unique (so to speak). Not only is it a festival within a festival, housed within the larger framework of the BSO-dominated Tanglewood season and the other chamber and orchestral programs of the Tanglewood Music Center, but it is the only summer festival to be devoted to music of the present. To this one may add another distinguishing feature, its association with a summer school of music for the elite among orchestral and chamber musicians and conductors. (It shares this attribute with Marlboro and to an extent Kneisel Hall and the Heifetz Center, but dwarfs these in scope). And this year, the TCMF, in celebration of its 70th season, is embarking on something that for it, is novel: the programming, curated by the all-star trio of composers Gunther Schuller, John Harbison, and Oliver Knussen, will be almost entirely devoted to an historical retrospective of music composed by the program directors, faculty and Fellows of the TMC over its entire lifetime so far, ranging from founding program director Aaron Copland and other 1940s-era faculty stars like Samuel Barber, Paul Hindemith and Leonard Bernstein, to 21st-century Fellows like Scotland’s Helen Grime. [continued...]
July 22, 2010
in: News & Features
Journeys from Judaism and Persecution in Mendelssohn and Mahler
by Eli Newberger
Gustav Mahler, born into a Jewish family, converted to Roman Catholicism in 1896 in order to preserve his career as a conductor, at a time when anti-Semitism became the norm of Germanic cultural identity and law. (1)
Felix Mendelssohn’s father Abraham, son of the Enlightment philosopher and Jewish sage, Moses Mendelssohn, converted to Lutheranism and added the hyphenation of Bartholdy, the name of a piece of land purchased by his brother-in-law to buffer his Jewish surname. He angrily rebuked his son for calling himself “Felix Mendelssohn” in concert programs in the 1820s:
A name is like a garment; it has to be appropriate for the time, the use, and the rank, if it is not to become a hindrance and a laughing-stock. … There can no more be a Christian Mendelssohn than there can be a Jewish Confucius. If Mendelssohn is your name, you are ipso facto a Jew.
July 16, 2010
in: News & Features
Classical Violinist/Fiddler to Play at Cape Cod Festival Concert
by Jeffrey S. Berman
Those of us who frequent Cape Cod have long been grateful for the presence of the Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival, which brings first-class artists to our summer haunts. Currently under the artistic leadership of pianist Jon Nakamatsu and clarinetist Jon Manasse, this organization appears to be flourishing. Among the concerts this summer is one in Provincetown on Monday, August 9, 2010, (and again on Thursday, August, 12 at the Dennis Union Church) by the Fry Street String Quartet. I am looking forward to this concert not just for the program (see below) but also because I have heard this young quartet mature and gel over the past several years into a distinct musical presence.
The group was organized in Chicago where the address of their first practice venue gave the quartet its name; since 2002 they have been in residence at the Caine School for the Arts at Utah State University in Logan. However, they have local roots, and even roots in the Cape. First violinist William Fedkenheuer is familiar to Bostonians from his tenure as second violin with the Borromeo Quartet, and the Fry Street Quartet has over the past two years made pilgrimages to Wellfleet on the Cape to have coaching with celebrated cellist Bernard Greenhouse. I spoke with Fedkenheuer, a native of Calgary and a former Canadian fiddling champion, about the upcoming concert.
Boston Musical Intelligencer: You were a fiddling champion in Canada; how does that relate to your career as a classical musician?
William Fedkenheuer: I began the violin at age four and was not as excited about the instrument as most loving parents would hope! However, I had a very special teacher who started me on fiddle tunes, and this turned into one of the greatest gifts I’ve received as a violinist. I loved fiddling, and so a deal was struck that I could fiddle as long as I wanted, but the classical building and technical exercises had to be completed first. [continued...]