Mark Wigglesworth, Stephen Hough and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra play Lutosławski, Mozart and Dvořák, and a Note on the Separateness of Math and Music

Hough

Sydney Opera House, Concert Hall, 13 October 2011

Witold Lutosławski
Symphony no. 4

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Piano Concerto no. 21 in C Major, K467

piano - Stephen Hough

Antonín Dvořák
Symphony no. 9 in E minor, opus 95

Sydney Symphony Orchestra
conductor - Mark Wigglesworth

Witold Lutosławski when he conducted himself preferred programs consisting solely of his own music to avoid entrapping the audience members who just wanted to hear again a classic (invariably put at the very end) and to encourage listeners who wanted to hear his music. However cynical you want to be about making the audience sit through avant-garde music to get to the ultra-popular Dvořák's Ninth Symphony, this was actually an adventurous program in being such a mixture. Risking the melomanic equivalent of the bends, somehow just avoided by virtue of the performance, specifically the Sydney Symphony's style and close cooperation with visiting Britons Mark Wigglesworth and the very intelligent and feeling pianist Stephen Hough, the musicians made it all seem to hang together naturally, if loosely.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!

Vasily Petrenko and Joshua Bell in a Russo-English Program with the SF Symphony: Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky, Glazunov, and Elgar, by Steven Kruger

Vasily Petrenko. Photo Mark McNulty.

The San Francisco Symphony
Davies Hall, San Francisco
Saturday, October 8, 2011
Vasily Petrenko, conductor
Joshua Bell, violin

Shostakovich - Festive Overture, Opus 96 (1954)
Tchaikovsky (arr. Glazunov) - Méditation, from Souvenir d'un lieu cher, Op. 42, No.1 (1878/1896)
Glazunov - Violin Concerto in A minor, Op. 82 (1904)
Elgar - Symphony No. 1 in A-flat major, Op. 55 (1908)

Hats off, ladies and Gentlemen!  A conductor!  And a great symphony!

Vasily Petrenko's recent electrifying week with the San Francisco Symphony reminds the listener that Gustavo Dudamel is not the sole "conducting animal" to be found on the musical circuit these days. Esa-Pekka Salonen coined the term a while back, with the impassioned Venezuelan in mind. And indeed, Dudamel is the sort of refreshing performer who has the winds jumping to their feet like jazz musicians and bass players twirling their instruments. He is all about emotion as vitality. But physically, apart from the energy with which he beats time, his manner is unremarkable.

Read the full review
 on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!








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Richard Harrington: ZERO SUM, an Exhibition at Greylock Arts, 93 Summer Street, Adams, Opening Oct. 28, 5.30-8.30


Upcoming Exhibit › Richard Harrington: ZERO SUM

An exhibition of mathematically based sculptures.

Richard Harrington, Dodecahedron, 2011
Richard Harrington, Dodecahedron, 2011

Richard Harrington is a visual artist whose career has spanned several decades. He has exhibited sculpture and light installations in addition to environmental works both in the United States and Europe. Several years ago Harrington returned to the Berkshires after living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The sculptures in ZERO SUMrepresent a recent body of work, with nearly all the sculptures included in the exhibition built from screen tetrahedrons, or four sided pyramids.

Read the full preview on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!



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A Singer’s Notes by Keith Kibler 39: Reading Theater


Jonathan Croy and Elizabeth Aspenlieder in Shakespeare & Company's War of the Worlds. Photo Kevin Sprague.

Books aren't what they used to be. Now we have devices. They talk and sing. They are a library. But can they really be read? Could we have a reading of a play from a Kindle? Of course we could. But could we really? What about the sound of clicking instead of a page turning? Or worse, complete silence as the page turns? In two pleasant visits to Shakespeare and Company this late summer, I started thinking about these things. How active is reading anyway? Can we read King Lear better than it can be played? What about centuries of western civilization where only a fraction of the people on earth could read, and an even smaller group owned a book? There are some among us who are fans of these eras and who claim we have lost the orality that animated their cultures. Sounds a lot to me like what people are saying about books just now. I wondered in the lines above if the act of turning a page in a staged reading is an important one. Is the actual sound of the page turning important? Does it distance us from the acting, or does it broaden the experience into something which is at once public and private? Why is there a sense of privacy, perhaps secrecy, around a person who is reading, even if they read in public? In Love's Labours Lost the character Dull is said to have "never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book. He hath not eat paper, as it were, he hath not drunk ink."

Read the full article
 on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!








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A Joyful and Humane B Minor Mass at Emmanuel Music: Ryan Turner begins his second season as Music Director, followed by a 2011-12 season schedule, by Michael Miller

 
Turner_ryan
Ryan Turner, Music Director of Emmanuel Music

Bach B Minor Mass
Saturday, September 24, 2011 - 8:00 PM

Pre-Concert Talk at 7:00 PM
with Robin A. Leaver
Emeritus Professor of Sacred Music at Westminster Choir College and Visiting Professor at Yale University

The Orchestra and Chorus of Emmanuel Music
Ryan Turner, conductor

Soloists:
Matthew Anderson
Roberta Anderson
Kendra Colton
Susan Consoli
Thea Lobo
Miranda Loud
Deborah Rentz-Moore
Sumner Thompson
Krista River
Teresa Wakim
Donald Wilkinson
Zachary Wilder

As Ryan Turner began his second season as Music Director of Emmanuel Music so ambitiously with Bach's B Minor Mass, it seems a good time to reflect on this small, but extremely productive organization and its place in the Boston musical world. One of the most characteristic—and felicitous—aspects of classical music in Boston is the proliferation of these groups, often founded around a chorus, but featuring non-choral music as well, often cultivating a speciality in Baroque music, and often combining this with the music of Classical, Romantic, and contemporary composers. Boston is home to other groups that play Baroque music on period instruments, and some of these have achieved international reputations. At Emmanuel music of the eighteenth century and earlier is played on modern instruments in a style which conforms more or less with the performance practices developed in the postwar years by Günther Ramin and Kurt Thomas with the Thomanerchor at Leipzig, and extending to Fritz Lehmann and Karl Richter in Berlin and Munich—with roots in the reformed performances of the 1920s. This doesn't mean that these musicians don't listen to their historically informed colleagues. In Boston, it is pretty well impossible for them not to exchange ideas and to learn from one another. As compelling as period performances of Baroque masters are, there is one great virtue to modern instruments: the music can be performed as part of a tradition extending up to the present day. The musicians can perform Bach seamlessly amidst Brahms, Bruckner, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Vaughn Williams, or, say, John Harbison, Principal Guest Conductor at Emmanuel Music, who wrote an enlightening personal note on the B Minor Mass for this performance.

Read the full review and preview
 on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!







Some Outstanding Whites from France, Italy, Spain, and New Zealand, by Geraldine Ramer

Sir John Gielgud in Alain Resnais' Providence (1977)

Sometimes I think I’m the only person in the room who likes white wine, but in this case we were outside celebrating a friend’s birthday in her charming garden on a small bluff overlooking the harbor. Someone came over and thanked me for recommending a wine to a mutual friend. “She told us about it and we’ve been drinking it ever since.” Seated in a comfortable lawn chair in that idyllic setting, watching some kayakers head toward home on the turning tide, I decided I ought to gather a list of some of my favorite white wines from this past summer before the warm weather entirely slips away.

The wine my friend was talking about is Chateau Ducasse, a Bordeaux Blanc made from semillon, sauvignon blanc and a bit of muscadelle. Having had this wine over several vintages, I too have been drinking it “ever since.”

If you like your sauvignon blanc straight up, so to speak, get a bottle of the one from Brancott Estate, a New Zealand producer. I took a bottle of the 2010 to a small gathering a few weeks ago and the first sips prompted unmistakable murmurs of satisfaction. Zingy, citrusy aromas followed by vibrant fruit highlighted by crisp acidity and a satiny texture make this a paradigmatic sauvignon blanc.

Read the full article on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!



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The Willoughby Symphony Orchestra Plays at Sydney’s Newest Concert Hall, by Andrew Miller


The Concourse, the new culture house, showing Warren Langley's fluorescent public art work. Photo: Alan Miller.

The Concourse, Chatswood, Sydney: 7 October, 2011
repeated 9 October 2011

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Piano Concerto No. 1 in B minor, Opus 23

Alexey Yemtsov - piano

Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Opus 125

Celeste Lazarenko - soprano
Anna Yun - mezzo-soprano
Warren Fisher - tenor
James Olds - bass-baritone

Willoughby Symphony Choir
Sarah Penicka-Smith - choir master

Willoughby Symphony Orchestra
Nicholas Milton - conductor

The Willoughby Symphony, founded in 1965 and based in Sydney's northern suburbs, played the first concert in their new hall. It is an exciting occasion to christen a new concert hall and I marvel at it all the more that it was built in Sydney's North Shore where new building is almost exclusively in the form of hideous apartment blocks which have destroyed many of the area's old gardens and once contiguous tree canopy. The 1000-seat hall is part of a whole culture house called The Concourse, which also has a 500-seat theatre, some impressive-sounding rehearsal space and the new home of the area's borrowing library. Willoughby Council deserves credit for pulling this off when the New South Wales state government one level up cannot manage anything like it for Barangaroo, right next to Sydney's downtown, let alone the second, Frank Gehry-designed opera house that's begging to be built there. But I mustn't be negative; this isn't the occasion.

Read the full review
 on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!








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Lorenzo Bartolini: Scultore del bello naturale, by Daniel B. Gallagher


Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Portrait of Bartolini, 1806, Musée Ingres, Montauban.

Lorenzo Bartolini: Scultore del bello naturale. Galleria dell’Accademia (Florence) until November 6th.

The rebellion against French academicism in the nineteenth century was carried out from several angles. A variety of new themes, subjects, and techniques were used as ammunition, and the expanding international market widened the battlefield. It was more than a two-sided contest between “conformists” and “non-conformists,” for there were multiple camps of non-conformists each of whom eventually found something else to cling to.

Lorenzo Bartolini (1777-1850) and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres clung to ancient art and that of the Quattrocento, albeit with a unique, personal touch and a foundation in the Neo-Classical principles they learned from Jacques Louis David. They, along with Pierre-Nolasque Bergeret, took up residence in David’s relocated studio at the Capuchin Convent. They admired their teacher’s emphasis on drawing and the use of live models, but they were also captured by Englishman John Flaxman (1755-1826), whose illustration and sculpture showed a range of freedom previously unknown to continental Neo-Classicism. This marked the beginning of a road that would lead Bartolini back to his Italian homeland enflamed with a passion for natural beauty and minute detail.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!



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The Willoughby Symphony Orchestra Plays at Sydney’s Newest Concert Hall

Chatswood-concourse-miller

The Willoughby Symphony, founded in 1965 and based in Sydney's northern suburbs, played the first concert in their new hall. It is an exciting occasion to christen a new concert hall and I marvel at it all the more that it was built in Sydney's North Shore where new building is almost exclusively in the form of hideous apartment blocks which have destroyed many of the area's old gardens and once contiguous tree canopy. The 1000-seat hall is part of a whole culture house called The Concourse, which also has a 500-seat theatre, some impressive-sounding rehearsal space and the new home of the area's borrowing library. Willoughby Council deserves credit for pulling this off when the New South Wales state government one level up cannot manage anything like it for Barangaroo, right next to Sydney's downtown, let alone the second, Frank Gehry-designed opera house that's begging to be built there. But I mustn't be negative; this isn't the occasion.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an international journal for the arts!

Lorenzo Bartolini: Scultore del bello naturale by Daniel B. Gallagher

Portrait-of-bartolini

The rebellion against French academicism in the nineteenth century was carried out from several angles. A variety of new themes, subjects, and techniques were used as ammunition, and the expanding international market widened the battlefield. It was more than a two-sided contest between “conformists” and “non-conformists,” for there were multiple camps of non-conformists each of whom eventually found something else to cling to.

Read the full review on The Berkshire Review, an international journal for the arts!