An Orchestra for All Seasons: Dvorak’s Faith, Schuller’s Dream, Prokofiev’s Shakespeare by Larry Wallach

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It takes some imagination to knit together the diverse strands of a program in which four conductors lead four works that have no obvious connections to each other. The obvious point is to show the playing abilities of extraordinary young musicians who have had only a few weeks to form themselves into an orchestra. The programmers apparently selected pieces that would challenge even the most seasoned group. It is no surprise, then, that the character of the playing altered radically from one work and conductor to the next.

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

Chamber Sextets and Octet by Spohr, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky With The Sydney Omega Ensemble

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Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, 1890. From the Tchaikovsky House Museum, Klin.

Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House: 8 July, 2012

Spohr – Octet in E major, op. 32
Beethoven – Sextet in E flat, op. 81b
Tchaikovsky – String Sextet in D minor ‘Souvenir de Florence’ op. 70

The Sydney Omega Ensemble
Emily Long – violin
Katie Betts – violin
Stuart Johnson – viola
Jacqui Cronin – viola
Rowena Macneish – cello
Timothy Nankervis – cello
Euan Harvey – horn
Rachel Silver – horn
David Rowen – clarinet
Ben Ward – double bass

Stepping down a semitone at a time starting from Spohr’s E Major, seeming to gravitate to the famous Tchaikovsky sextet in D Minor, this group of young musicians brings quite an ambitious program. Despite some uneven playing of the first piece, they became stronger and stronger to give a very satisfying take on the last.

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

A Singer’s Notes 51: North County – South County by Keith Kibler

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Something about Williamstown Theatre Festival’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” just didn’t click for me. It was not for lack of ideas — several clever, a couple brilliant. It was the flow. I noticed it right away when the stage couldn’t seem to set up a rhythm with the laughter in the house. When a comedy is really cooking, a rhythm sets up. It’s a kind of play, this back and forth. When it is really good, it has a naturalness, even an inevitability. That did not happen in the performance I heard (July 4). Lines were often lost in the laughter; the house was often slow to respond, and once in a while the response seemed forced.

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

Altogether Now: the 18th Biennale of Sydney by Alan Miller

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A good biennale dances a tricky pas de deux with its theme. Too little constraint lands us in Charles Foster Kane’s warehouse, too heavy a curatorial hand stifles the unruliness which is contemporary art’s great charm. The curators of this year’s Biennale of Sydney, Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster, have taken an inquisitive approach to their theme. If all our relations sets itself up against a modernist heroism which must by now be as rickety as a leaky curtain wall, its pluralism does not mean anything and everything and isn’t it so groovy we’re all connected all the time? In their curatorial statement Zegher and McMaster place their biennale within “a renewed attention to how things connect” which is already at large in the world. Bad connections spark and sputter all over the place, while good ones, we hope, form in the shadows or underground, always in resistance to the dark force of an individualism of consumers instead of individuals. all our relations is not the same as “let’s get together and feel alright” and it is not, as some feared when the theme was first announced, a rejection of the visionary in favor of a dull but worthy collectivism. Both extremes are too easy, as is most territory in between.

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

The Philadelphia Orchestra at Davies Hall — A Great Legend Intact — Two Concerts by Steven Kruger

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Charles Dutoit.

Davies Hall, San Francisco

The Philadelphia Orchestra
Charles Dutoit – conductor

Saturday, June 9, 2012
Hindemith – Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Carl Maria Von Weber
Ravel – Piano Concerto in G Major
Louis Lortie – piano
Shostakovich - Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Opus 47

Sunday, June 10, 2012
Ranjbaran – Saratoga
Rachmaninoff – Symphonic Dances, Opus 45
Debussy – Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun
Scriabin – The Poem of Ecstasy, Opus 54

The Philadelphia Orchestra always WAS the sexiest!

Back in the publicity heyday of art music and the aftermath of Toscanini, Americans knew their five orchestras. It went like this: in Boston you listened to Charles Munch for Gallic excitability. In Chicago, Reiner ruled with a heart of stone but turned out warmer central European renditions than Toscanini had. You flocked to Bernstein for eruptive passion and disreputable energy in New York. And at Severance Hall, in a state of penance, you submitted to the owlish purges of George Szell. But nothing seduced the listener so much as The Philadelphia Orchestra, under the direction of Eugene Ormandy.

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

Paris aime la photographie III by Erin C. Devine

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When walking into Paris’s first retrospective exhibition of the photographs of Eva Besnyö at the Jeu de Paume, I was met with three mysterious images, visually linked by their askew perspectives. One is a self-portrait of Besnyö, who was born in Budapest in 1910 and broke free of Hungary’s provincial constraints to become a Berlin-based photographer at the young age of 20. The image of the woman in the portrait looks, in a word, contemporary. Unconventionally beautiful, Besnyö looks intensely into her medium format camera, hair tousled as her neck cranes above the view finder to which she is acutely focused, projecting an image of herself as an intense, slightly bohemian artist at work. Besnyö orchestrated this image of 1931 so that the viewer looks up to her from down below, and thus elevated before us is a powerful figure who directs our gaze and controls her own image long before similar strategies were conceived by feminist artists of the 1960s. It is from this point that the viewer commences into an exhibition of 120 prints by a photographer who has been given too little attention.

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

Monadnock Music 2012 Preview and Concert Schedule: the First Season under the Directorship of Gil Rose, by Michael Miller

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A Monadnock Music Evening at Peterborough Town House. Photo © 2006 Michael Miller.

In the wake of Opera Boston’s sad demise, the appointment of Gil Rose, who had led the company so brilliantly, as Artistic Director of the Monadnock Music came as cheering news. With the 2012 summer season beginning, we can look forward to the fruits of the board’s wise decision. The summer schedule is an eclectic masterpiece which accurately reflects the taste of the more sophisticated music-lover of today, especially in Boston. In comparison, other festival programs seem stodgy. Its mix of modern, contemporary, classical and opera continues the tradition established by James Bolle, who is primarily a composer himself, extended by a few programs of baroque music on period instruments, a significant strain in contemporary performance. Some of the participants like James Maddalena will be familiar to long-time festival goers, while others are new. The combination of free (now called “voluntary”) local concerts around the Monadnock region and more formal ticketed concerts in the Peterborough Town House continues. By perusing the schedule, I get the impression that the quality of the voluntary concerts has improved.

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


The Takács Quartet Visits Sydney by Andrew Miller

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The Takács Quartet. Photo by Richard Houghton.

City Recital Hall, Angel Place: 23 June 2012
The Quartet play in Newcastle on 29 June, Melbourne on 30 June, and Sydney on 2 July.

Leoš Janáček – String Quartet no 1, ‘Kreutzer’
Benjamin Britten – String Quartet no 1 in D major, op 25
Gordon Kerry – Variations for string quartet
Claude Debussy – String Quartet in G minor, op 10

Takács Quartet
Edward Dusinberre – violin
Károly Schranz – violin
Geraldine Walther – viola
András Fejér – cello

I’ve written many times about musicians’ giving spiels before they play and how intrusive this can be on the music by denying that important transition from the audience’s excited chatter as they find their seats, to the musicians’ walking on, to the silence before the first note. These spiels are very different from the pre-concert talks which are common now and elective, take place well before the actual concert, and can be informative. Here was a more egregious example — first violin Edward Dusinberre gave an entire short lecture before the Janáček and Britten quartets, complete with short musical excerpts just before they hoed into the actual piece. Then Gordon Kerry himself was brought on to talk about his piece just before they played it. I think even a “modern audience” can take its music straight and have a fighting chance of understanding it. The lecturing seemed to throw them off, the words over-specifying and materializing the music, being too heavily prosaic for the music to bear, though perhaps jet-lag and fatigue from touring, or just a bad day contributed, but it was disappointing that the music of this usually very fine group sounded so flat.

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

Mohawk Trail Concerts 2012: Preview and Concert Schedule

Charlemont Federated Church

The Mohawk Trail Concerts have been taking place in the Federated Church in Charlemont, Massachusetts since 1969, when Arnold Black, the distinguished violinist and composer, discovered the outstanding acoustics of this attractive old church. Since then, the festival has presented a rich variety of standard repertoire, modern, contemporary, and less familiar older works. Regulars look forward to the annual concert of Joan Morris and William Bolcom, who will celebrate Bastille Day this year.

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


Music Mountain Chamber Music Series Season Preview and Schedule 2012: the Summer of String Quartets Continued, by Michael Miller

The St. Petersburg Quartet Making their way to the music shed at Music Mountain. Photo © 2008 Michael Miller.

This will be an unusually rich summer for string quartets, but Music Mountain will send it into the stratosphere with a schedule in which every concert but one will feature a string quartet, in some cases augmented with a piano, an extra stringed instrument, or winds. The St. Petersburg Quartet, which has been a mainstay of Music Mountain for some years opened the season with a benefit concert including Beethoven Op. 18, no. 4, Tchaikovsky, and the Brahms Piano Quintet with Misha Dichter. The Arianna Quartet followed this with Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Op. 30, and the Franck Piano Quintet with Tanya Bannister.

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