Music
1926 results
Page 99
Orchestra plays Shostakovich (1st review)
Fifty years of horror
If the Shostakovich Eleventh is performed with the right sensitivity and conviction, it’s no mere evocation of tragic events, but a lament for the human tragedy itself. Guest conductor Semyon Bychkov’s performance emphasized the tapestry-like elements of the score at the expense of some of the drama.
Articles
7 minute read
A composer’s secrets
Secrets of a great composer (who hasn't yet mastered the elevator speech)
When I recently dug out an anthem I’d written 32 years ago, I was struck by how good it was— and how bad it was, too. How could I salvage it? Just another day in the life of a composer.
Articles
6 minute read
Met’s misguided new ‘Eugene Onegin’
If it ain't broke....
The Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Eugene Onegin is full of innovations, almost all of them detrimental.
Articles
4 minute read
Orchestra plays Britten, Strauss and Mahler
Clothes make the music man
Oboist Richard Woodhams took the stage in a tailored blue shirt, worn outside his pants— It symbolizes a change in attitude— a signal that the Philadelphia Orchestra understands its need to experiment and adapt.
Articles
4 minute read
Yannick leads Beethoven’s Ninth (2nd review)
Yannick leaps off a musical cliff
Yannick Nézet-Séguin is emerging as an artist of notable imagination and daring. In the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth he was maybe a little too daring.
Articles
3 minute read
Yannick leads Beethoven’s Ninth (1st review)
In the quest for goose bumps, size matters
Yannick-Nézet Séguin’s version of Beethoven’s Ninth inadvertently demonstrated that the same work can be performed in radically different ways. He made the most of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s major asset: Its size.
Articles
4 minute read
Opera Philadelphia’s ‘Nabucco’ (2nd review)
The mightiest man on Earth? (and other flaws in Verdi’s Nabucco)
Nabucco’s characters lack depth, and the music is less accomplished than what Verdi would write just a few years later. So director/designer Thaddeus Strassberger was indeed clever to mount this Nabucco as it might have been performed in Italy in the 1840s.
Articles
4 minute read
Opera Philadelphia’s ‘Nabucco’ (1st review)
Jehovah vs. Baal, then and now
Verdi’s dramatically clunky Nabucco was a broadly drawn metaphor for Austria’s domination of Italy. Thaddeus Strassberger constructs a play around a play in an effort to mask some of the drama’s weaknesses. Its virtues include a fiery new soprano and a final moment of genuine theatrical magic.
Articles
4 minute read
Philadelphia Orchestra’s Tchaikovsky opening
Back to the future with Yannick and Anne-Sophie
What have the Russians done for us lately? Well, Tchaikovsky is timeless, as the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter reminded us on opening night.
Articles
2 minute read
Orchestra 2001’s opening weekend (2nd review)
Young composer, astonishing head
Sometimes I dread poems set to music. But when it works, it’s art. Chris Rogerson's Fishing was one of three new works, each giving a prominent role to the keyboard.
Articles
5 minute read