Classical Music
Less Talk, More Rock
Neikrug’s New Concerto at the Philharmonic On a Friday afternoon, the New York Philharmonic began a concert with the Corsair overture of Berlioz. Then it was time for a new work, a concerto for orchestra by Marc Neikrug. The conductor, Alan Gilbert, did not stride to the podium to conduct. He and the composer ambled...
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Tennessee’s Quiet Storm
Transforming the Classic ‘Streetcar’ Nicole Ari Parker has a triumph in A Streetcar Named Desire that our mainstream media and the cli-quish Tony Awards are ill-equipped to handle. Parker’s ravishing, statuesque presence and intelligent skill make the play what it always ought to have been: a genuine contest between America’s sexual and political hypocrisies; social...
Yuja on Fire
And a visit by a venerable quartet For several years, we have called Yuja Wang a wunderkind, a phenom, a sensation. For how long can we keep talking that way? She’s 25 now. I figure we can continue for a couple more years. Most recently in New York, she played Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3...
For All Mankind
Pro Musicis shares and evokes Sometimes a concert is more than a concert. Celebrating its 46th season, Pro Musicis (“For Musicians”) presented pianists Andrew Staupe and Alexandria Le at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall April 11 for an evening of Mendelssohn, Debussy and Mussorgsky, as well as a trio of world premieres by Karl Blench,...
Movie Star Music
Barber and Michael Hersch Make Lasting Magnificence A recent movie, The Deep Blue Sea, has a musical star, and by rights it should be “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” the hit song from 1932 (music by Harold Arlen, words by Ted Koehler). The movie takes its name from this song. So does...
CityArts Partner: The Kioi Sinfonietta Tokyo Celebrates the Centennial of Japan’s Gift of the Cherry Blossom Trees with a Four-City U.S. Tour
As the first cherry blossoms are beginning to bloom in New York, the musicians of the Kioi Sinfonietta Tokyo are preparing for their first visit to the U.S. to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Japan’s gift of the cherry blossom trees to the United States. As part of this tour, the Kioi Sinfonietta Tokyo, one...
Pinnacle Pianists
Bronfman and Perahia in Recital In the space of three days, New York heard two recitals by two major pianists: Yefim Bronfman and Murray Perahia. The former was born in Tashkent and became a New Yorker. The latter was born in New York and became a Londoner. Go figure. Bronfman played in Carnegie Hall, and...
Highbrow Hybrid
Making La Boheme More More Vivid Emerging Pictures’ Opera in Cinema series might well have set a new bar for cinematic transmission of live opera with their March 13 rebroadcast of Puccini’s La Bohème, performed and recorded on March 7 at Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu, with Fiorenza Cedolins as Mimi, Ramon Vargas as Rodolfo,...
Orchestral Rankings
Philadelphia and BERLIN Philharmonics Compete Carnegie Hall has hosted several orchestras lately, including one from a short train ride away and one from a longish plane ride away. The first was the Philadelphia Orchestra, the second the Berlin Philharmonic. The Philadelphians have gone through hard times in recent years, including bankruptcy. But they sounded their...
A Sea of Sound
Tallying New York’s philharmonic excess By Joseph Smith Is it just me or is it too loud in here? Often, when I attend symphonic concerts, I find myself disconcerted by the noisiness of the programming. It seems to me that concerts now tend to be too unrelievedly composed of works from periods that favor dense,...
Preview: Gerald Finley In Concert
Darkness and light resume their eternal dance in bass-baritone Gerald Finley’s recital Feb. 27 at Alice Tully, part of Lincoln Center’s “Art of the Song” series. Finley’s recital at Zankel Hall two years ago was a knockout. Now he’s returning to the New York recital stage with an entirely different program of 19th-, 20th- and...
A Tale of Two Operas
Agility, power, wit and heft at the Met In the classic cartoons, opera singers are fat and often wear horns. You will see that in real life, too. But opera singers, like other people, come in all shapes and sizes, and so do operas. In consecutive performances, the Met staged operas on opposite ends of...
Musical Images: North/South Consonance Finds Modernity
What Film Forum is to cinema, North/South Consonance is to modern classical music—an independent nonprofit bringing New York City deserving works overlooked by big-ticket distributors and mainstream media. North/South continued its 32 season of free concerts Feb. 19 with “Midwinter Sounds,” music for chamber orchestra by composers from Cuba, Italy, and the U.S., at Christ...
Platinum Premiere
Jubilee concert honors Glass and Pärt Carnegie Hall hosted the best birthday party ever as the American Composers Orchestra presented the Philip Glass 75th Birthday Concert in the Isaac Stern Auditorium Jan. 31. Thousands of composers, musicians and music lovers broke into a roar when Glass was introduced, giving him no less than four curtain...
It’s Clarinet Month
Williamson, McGill, Meyer and Shifrin blow up Say what you will about piano playing, conducting, violin playing and, especially, composing: This is a very good age for clarinet playing, even a great one. We have Alessandro Carbonare, Martin Fröst, Kari Kriikku and Julian Bliss, among others. Four of those others played in New York during...
Flying Colors
Horne and Fleming Instruct A Master Class Better than watching a master do what she does best is watching a master teach what she does best. Twin master classes led by divas Marilyn Horne and Renée Fleming under Carnegie Hall’s “The Song Continues…” series illuminated the potential that is unleashed when knowledge is given with...
Delivering Thrills
When the Vienna Philharmonic plays a New Year’s concert, the program is Viennesey—Strauss polkas and all that. When the New York Philharmonic plays a New Year’s concert, the program is New Yorky. At least it was this year. Their program on New Year’s Eve consisted of Gershwin and Bernstein. The former composer, of course, was...
Doctor Atomic II
Des McAnuff’s Faust at The Met It was with Gounod’s Faust that the Metropolitan Opera opened its doors in 1883, and the company has done many a staging since. The latest production is in the hands of Des McAnuff. A veteran director, he has had hits on Broadway—e.g., Jersey Boys—and leads the Shakespeare festival in...
Don Giovanni Lives
Mozart live from La Scala For $25, low-heeled New Yorkers got to attend the opening night of La Scala’s 2011–12 season, with its new production of Don Giovanni (Anna Netrebko as Donna Anna, Peter Mattei as the Don, Bryn Terfel as Leporello, Daniel Barenboim conducting). Emerging Pictures, distributor of “alternative” (read “non-Hollywood”) content like opera,...
Familiarizing Great Music
The Philharmonic’s survival programs Out of apathy, fear or intransigence, we barricade ourselves from things we don’t know—people, places, music. Symphonic music is often thrust behind these barricades, so the New York Philharmonic has created an education department to help bring it out front where it belongs. Why does it belong out front? Director of...
A Ring That Chimes
Enlivening Wagner’s third installment One by one, we are seeing the operas of Wagner’s Ring at the Metropolitan Opera, in a new production by Robert Lepage. We have now seen the third opera, Siegfried, the one that follows Die Walküre and precedes the finale, Götterdämmerung. Lepage has not made a Siegfried that will dance through...
