Articles
6207 results
Page 349
Yannick conducts Mahler and Hilary Hahn (2nd review)
Mahler's message: Who needs transitions?
Yannick Nézet-Séguin probed beyond the obvious in Mahler's First Symphony, but I wish he'd pushed Hilary Hahn to play a less predictable work.
Articles
4 minute read
Learning to love "The Avengers'
What I did for love
The mindless “Avengers” films and their various comic-book spinoffs have already wasted hours of my life at a cost of hundreds of dollars, and there's no end in sight. On the other hand, they may have saved my marriage.
Articles
6 minute read
Rattle and Lang Lang with the Orchestra
Lang Lang grows up
A varied program by Sir Simon Rattle included a most peculiar linking of the Sibelius Sixth and Seventh Symphonies. The histrionic Lang Lang, conversely, is beginning to appreciate that the music is more important than the musician.
Articles
5 minute read
Musicians from Marlboro at the Perelman
A feast before the famine
In a concert of highly contrasting works by Stravinsky, Britten and the young Johannes Brahms, the young Musicians from Marlboro played as if they'd been together for years. A happy audience dispersed to face, alas, Philadelphia's annual summer chamber music drought.
Articles
6 minute read
Bruce Graham's "North of the Boulevard'
Bruce Graham grows up
Bruce Graham has written so many plays that it may be appropriate to describe his work as facile. But his last two works provide credible characters wrestling with difficult decisions.
Articles
3 minute read
"Orphans' on Broadway: The Boston Marathon link
Two abandoned brothers, then and now, or: Does this story sound familiar?
I saw Orphans when it opened in the 1980s, and remember being repelled by its violence and ferocity. Not now. This hilarious, harrowing absurdist drama sheds chilling insight into the two brothers charged in the Boston Marathon bombing.
Articles
5 minute read
Mumia again: Stephen Vittoria's 'Long Distance Revolutionary'
The elephant in the room
Is Mumia Abu-Jamal a cop-killer rightly locked up for life, or a political prisoner whose conviction embodied a racist era in Philadelphia the city will never get past until he is set free? This new documentary argues strongly for the latter viewpoint but passes too quickly over the central question: Was Mumia guilty or innocent?
Articles
6 minute read
The fallacy of "The Voice'
Follow your passion, but what's your second choice?
My teenage daughter, infected by TV shows like “The Voice,” hopes to be a famous singer. Should I encourage her fantasy or squelch it?
Articles
4 minute read
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What was Mahler thinking? (1st comment)
Can art foretell the future?
Mahler's First Symphony baffled its listeners, and he never explained it. But its meaning seemed clear to me, at least.
Articles
2 minute read
Lyric Fest's "Rosetta Stone'
Found in translation
Lyric Fest never does anything quite the way anyone else would do it. The group finished its season with another program on an odd theme: songs by composers who took their texts from foreign languages.
Articles
4 minute read