January 27, 2012

in: Reviews

Helios’s Elegant Expression in Charpentier

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For Zoe Weiss and Dylan Sauerwald, revising and writing continuo for a working edition of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s David et Jonathas was a labor of love, and last night at the First Congregational Church in Cambridge, a lucky audience got to enjoy the fruits of their efforts.    [continued]

January 27, 2012

in: Reviews

Zaïde’s Ineradicable Impression at NEC

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From their very first notes sounded in unison, Quatuor Zaïde gripped a smallish yet discerning audience, thrusting it into that resonant and perfect space of New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall with miraculous coups via Mozart, Beethoven and Wolf — all with ineffable élan thoroughly meshed with astonishing poise.     [continued]

January 27, 2012

in: Reviews

Roving with Music and Art

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Thursday night’s concert at the Community Music Center of Boston was part of “The Year of Roving, Event #2 produced by New Gallery Concert Series’s director and gifted pianist Sarah Bob.  Its offbeat theme was DOODLE, and the artwork by Tessa Day, was quite amazing to anyone whose children has ever tinkered with a Magna Doodle.  Brava to Tessa Day!!!     [continued]

January 25, 2012

in: Reviews

Common Tones: Two Takes on Eternity

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The program for the Cantata Singers’ “Astonished Breath” on January 21 at First Church in Cambridge, filled  the sanctuary with an enthusiastic audience who had braved the first serious snowfall of the season to experience the Concerto for Choir of iconoclastic Russian composer Alfred Schnittke and the Berliner Messe by Estonian Arvo Pärt.     [continued]

January 24, 2012

in: Reviews

BSO Chamber Players Let Down Hair in Brahms

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The BSO Chamber Players are always certain to make music on a very high level.  Their execution is never less that super-refined. This year their programming is geographically themed, and on Sunday in Jordan Hall, we were serenaded in Austro-German style by works of Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms — not much of a geographic stretch!      [continued]

January 24, 2012

in: Reviews

Acoustics Vs Performance: Claremont Trio at ISGM

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Last Sunday afternoon a sold-out crowd eagerly listened as Claremont Trio played in the new Calderwood Hall at the Gardner Museum. This article relates my experience listening to the performance from the first balcony in front of the musicians. My experience there was good – not great. Listeners in other areas of the first balcony had a much more variable experience, and on the whole they were disappointed.     [continued]

January 24, 2012

in: Reviews

Dinosaur Does Contemporary Aesthetics

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Dinosaur Annex’s ninth annual Young Composers Concert, on Sunday, at the Goethe-Institut, presented a curious cross-section of contemporary aesthetics. The concert began with Michael Ippolito’s Nocturne for flute, violin, and piano. From its initial chromatic rise and fall to its sparkling conclusion, his Nocturne traversed the various moods of night, from tranquility touched by dark dissonance to a scurrying, striving activity, accented by trills, and back to a heavy melancholy.     [continued]

January 23, 2012

in: Reviews

NEC Youth Phil Inspired Through Difficulties

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Difficult? Well, this January 20th concert’s breadth of challenges would faze almost any orchestra, but this wonderful NEC Youth Philharmonic soared past almost all of its technical issues. Inspired playing abounded. The difficulty was the missing presence of their mentor, the person who had rehearsed, encouraged and ultimately inspired them, their long-time leader Benjamin Zander.      [continued]

January 23, 2012

in: Reviews

Blowing Dust off Outcast Composers

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Devotés of unjustly neglected music were given a belated Christmas present  by the Boston Chamber Music Society at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium with Exiled to Hollywood: Outcast Artists in Southern California, featuring works by five such composers. The significant migration of artists and scholars who fled Fascism in Europe in the 1930s has been a hot topic of the last 20 years.    [continued]

January 23, 2012

in: Reviews

BYSO Shines in Verdi’s Shakespeare

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Yesterday’s performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Falstaff at Sanders Theatre in Cambridge was one of the most exciting musical events I’ve attended in years. All parts of this operatic performance were scintillating, but the most astounding aspect was the accomplishment of the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestras under Federico Cortese’s direction.     [continued]

January 23, 2012

in: Reviews

Shanghai Quartet Rewards Devoted Audience

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The Foundation for Chinese Performing Arts presented the Shanghai Quartet with pianist Hung-Kuan Chen in concert at Jordan Hall on Saturday 21 January at 8pm. The innovative program spanned Beethoven, Penderecki, and Brahms; a devoted audience braved the newly fallen snow and enjoyed the reward of a fine evening of music.     [continued]

January 23, 2012

in: Reviews

Pianist Le Transports Audience to Sunnier Climes

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On Saturday evening, January 21, a hardy band of music lovers trudged through a blanket of freshly fallen snow to take in a solo recital performed by the young American pianist Alexandria Le in the warm confines of Longy School’s Pickman Concert Hall. Less hardy souls had another option: this concert was also streamed live on the Web. Very 2012.     [continued]

January 23, 2012

in: Reviews

Emmanuel Music Delivers

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For the fourth and last of this year’s concerts dedicated to Beethoven’s chamber music, Emmanuel Music presented some quite rarely heard works, all of which deserved a hearing. Four string players, two horn players, a baritone and a pianist took turns entertaining the full hall, and brought this series to an unusually delightful end.     [continued]

January 22, 2012

in: Reviews

Kings Chapel Choir Leads Tour

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The King’s Chapel Choir treated a healthy-sized audience to what they billed as “A Baltic Cruise” — a musical tour through choral works by composers hailing from Estonia, Sweden, Latvia, Denmark, Poland, Russia and Finland. Led by the energetic and always musical Heinrich Christensen, the choir showcased their stylistic flexibility and rhythmic panache.     [continued]

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January 26, 2012

in: News & Features

More Music for Monadnock Region

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Two recent disappointments for area musicians have, in the past few days, spawned two developments that stand only to benefit classical-music concertgoers to the Monadnock region. Jonathan Bagg and Laura Gilbert, who had been let go as artistic directors of Monadnock Music, have started a new venture, Electric Earth, that already has six concerts planned and three in the pipeline for the rest of this 2011-12 season; and Gil Rose, who lost his position as artistic director of Opera Boston when it abruptly shut operations just before Christmas, has just been appointed artistic director of Monadnock Music, which runs a full summer program of concerts. In both cases, long-standing loyalties and professional associations played major parts in the decisions.

The atmosphere at Monadnock Music, founded in 1966 by James Bolle, has seemed to visitors very much like “Our Town.” Gilbert stressed that she and Bagg, who have over 20 years of association with Monadnock Music between them, are “going right back to the grassroots — trying to engage as many people as we can, in as many ways with music… for our beautiful, humble, rural Monadnock Region.” [continued...]

January 21, 2012

in: News & Features

Heloise and Abelard Debuts as “Church Opera”

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The 12th-century saga of Heloise and Abelard comes to us from many sources, though most importantly from the actual correspondence of the protagonists. The tale has been set in many literary, musical and theatrical forms, including a long-running Broadway play in the early 1970’s and at least twice before as an opera, but next week, for the first time, it will be the subject of a  “church opera.” Heloise and Abelard by composer John Austin, set to a libretto by Christine Froula, will debut at Harvard’s Memorial Church on January 29th at 4:00 PM. Tickets are available here. [continued...]

January 17, 2012

in: News & Features

BCMS 2012 Winter Festival and Forum

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The Boston Chamber Music Society and the MIT Music and Theater Arts faculty’s joint presentation on Saturday afternoon, January 21 at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium will address the topic Exiled to Hollywood: Outcast Artists in Southern California. The presentation allows us to explore the contributions of six composers (plus one) — Arnold Schoenberg, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Hanns Eisler, Ernst Toch, Erich Korngold and Ingolf Dahl — who were compelled by rising tyranny to leave Europe and remake their lives and careers in America, where they came to terms with university and film cultures. [continued...]

January 16, 2012

in: News & Features

Distractions from Gardner’s Visceral Mission?

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The new addition to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, designed by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, in Genoa, Italy, was completed in this month and opened with much fanfare.

A bit about the 1902 Palace is in order, to start. We know that Isabella Stewart Gardner was literate, well traveled, and deeply interested in art. It’s easy to imagine that such a connected, wealthy, and vibrant woman would have known about some of the ascendant thinking about art in her day. In the second half of the 19th century, one group of thinkers believed that art should be personally felt, intense, and unaffected by the corrupting influence of too much Classical learning. Art was more than just an object to be studied intellectually. Rather, art was part of a whole environment that included dance, music, and furnishings. Art for them gained meaning and effectiveness by its surroundings. [continued...]

January 11, 2012

in: News & Features

Calderwood Hall at ISGM: An Acoustician’s Report

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This report is my preview of the eagerly awaited new music hall at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The new Calderwood Hall is replacing the Tapestry Gallery as the site for concerts. My observations are based partly on a guided tour a few weeks ago during which we heard no music, and partly on my observations from today’s official press opening which included a rehearsal by A Far Cry chamber orchestra.

Calderwood Hall, designed by Renzo Piano and Yasuhisa Toyota, is built into a cube 44 feet on a side. Two rows of audience surround the musicians on the floor. The rest of the seating is in three tiers of four-sided balconies – each only one row deep. Seating capacity is approximately 300, similar to the 330 seats of the Shalin Liu Hall in Rockport, but the designs of these two halls, and their sounds, could not be more different. [continued...]

January 11, 2012

in: News & Features

At first blush: A Far Cry at Calderwood Hall

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Some weeks ago, A Far Cry, the Gardner Museum’s resident chamber orchestra, got to do an early sound-check on the soon-to-be-opened Calderwood Hall that inhabits the Museum’s new Renzo Piano designed wing. Violist Sarah Darling’s musings follow.

If there had been a documentary film about that morning, it would almost certainly have begun with shots of the various musicians of A Far Cry engaged in mundane tasks such as rolling out of bed, making tea, assembling the exact constellation of materials that they would need for that one day only (there’s rarely any verbatim repetition in the life of an active Boston musician), making their way to subways, buses, and cars, and converging on the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Shots of faces and brief interviews would highlight a sense of excited anticipation, plus a little tension, expressed differently through each individual. Meanwhile, the camera stationed at the Gardner would catch a couple of early birds waiting patiently, then one by one, the group of musicians would swell to critical mass, topped off by the last arrivals, panting slightly. Winding its way through the museum, the next camera would certainly snag one or two looks of utter delight as we got to the light-drenched glass hallway that connected to the new wing, leading to the ultimate treat – something new and wonderful to explore, something where nothing had been before. [continued...]

December 31, 2011

in: News & Features

Metcalfe’s Monteverdi Vespers to Arrive in Cambridge

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The long and lofty barrel vault of St. Paul’s Church in Cambridge will resonate with music of Monteverdi and his contemporaries on January 7, when Green Mountain Project presents as a free concert, Scott Metcalfe’s reconstruction of a vespers service from 1640. The New York Times called GMP’s performance in that city of the 1610 Vespers “quite simply terrific,” and New York Magazine named it one of the Top Ten Classical Music Events of 2010.

Unlike Monteverdi’s earlier Vespro della Beata Vergine of 1610, the 1640 version is incomplete, Metcalfe explained, so he “fashioned a Marian Vespers, based on the 1610 model, featuring psalms and motets from later Monteverdi sacred works, using the 1610 setting of the hymn, Ave maris stella, along with music by the great Venetian, Giovanni Gabrieli and the Milanese composer-nun, Chiara Margarita Cozzolani.”  [continued...]

December 23, 2011

in: News & Features

Opera Lovers Stunned by Opera Boston’s Closing

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Opera Boston Board Chair Winifred P. Gray and Board President Gregory E. Bulger announced today, two days before Christmas and halfway through Hanukkah, that the company, facing an insurmountable budget deficit, is closing its doors on Jan. 1, 2012. The news has stunned the Boston opera-loving community, as it was widely believed that Opera Boston always managed to balance the budget by the end of the year. And as recently as 2010, when former General Director Carole Charnow left, the company had zero debt.

“Over the years, we have never had a big loss; we have raised enough money,” explained Bulger. “Unfortunately, in the last fiscal year that ended in July, we had the biggest budget deficit in our history — over $200,000. Normally, we have an end-of-the-year campaign which in this year did not go well. Some donors just didn’t come through.” [continued...]

December 23, 2011

in: News & Features

Reminiscences on the Musical Year Past

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As the old year wanes, many of us are subject to bouts of introspection. The several BMInt writers who are not immune to that tendency have each submitted lists of three of their favorite CDs and concerts of the last season. We thank them for their reflections. Some have chosen to nominate concerts they have reviewed while others have chosen from concerts which they merely attended. During the past 12 months BMInt has published over 600 reviews and articles, so this article must needs place a severe test on the memories of the participants. But this exercise also gives us all yet another reminder of how much to be grateful for the musical life of Boston and its environs. We salute all of our players, writers and presenters. Happy New Year. [continued...]

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