Posts Tagged ‘Stravinsky’

Jansons Turns 75

Friday, January 12th, 2018

By ANDREW POWELL Published: January 12, 2018 MUNICH — Against the medical odds, perhaps, Mariss Jansons turns seventy-five on Sunday, still adored by his favorite orchestra. Bavarian Broadcasting marks the occasion with a 44-minute video portrait, Im Zeichen der Musik, or In the Music’s Character, freely watchable. Last evening here at the Gasteig, a subscription […]

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Pogorelich Soldiers On

Monday, March 16th, 2015

By ANDREW POWELL Published: March 16, 2015 MUNICH — Ivo Pogorelich wants to continue to play. He has recital programs planned out till 2020. He keeps several concertos in his repertory, the Chopin F-Minor and Prokofiev Third performed here persuasively in recent seasons. He is “pleased,” he writes, about a new box of his old […]

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LeeSaar’s Dancing Tongues

Monday, April 28th, 2014

Toward the end of LeeSaar’s Princess Crocodile, seven bare legged female dancers line up, open their red-painted mouths, and— like it’s the most mundane thing in the world—wildly wag their tongues at the audience. This culminating act lasts a good minute. It felt oddly fitting, and it became the theatrical highlight of the newest work by the husband-wife team Saar Harari and Lee Sher, seen April 10 at the Baryshnikov Arts Center’s Howard Gilman Performance Space.

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Busy Week

Tuesday, April 1st, 2014

By ANDREW POWELL Published: April 1, 2014 MUNICH — In every book on time management, there is a chapter about giving your work to someone else. Delegation, they say, is a virtue: an assistant exercises new authority and the delegator accomplishes other tasks, perhaps in other places. Maybe in another country. Or two. Take Valery […]

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Stravinsky On Autopilot

Thursday, March 27th, 2014

By ANDREW POWELL Published: March 27, 2014 MUNICH — In eight days in May 2004, as a kind of audition for the post of principal conductor, Valery Gergiev drove the London Symphony Orchestra brilliantly, if roughly, through recorded concerts of all of Prokofiev’s symphonies. Acclaim ensued, he got the job, and two years later the […]

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I Love Youth Orchestras

Thursday, March 7th, 2013

by Sedgwick Clark NOTE: MY BLOG IS NOW POSTED ON THURSDAYS AT NOON RATHER THAN WEDNESDAYS. Why? The kids aren’t jaded. No repertoire is too daunting. Their enthusiasm nearly always makes up for any momentary technical shortcoming. One skips concerts at Juilliard at his or her peril and often encounters first-rate conductors that the Philharmonic has neglected. […]

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‘Le Boeuf sur le Toit’ recreates 1920s Parisian Club

Friday, November 23rd, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid The eclectic musical life of the brief but thriving ‘Roaring twenties’ continues to inspire a nostalgia that is all the more understandable given contemporary classical music’s reorientation toward popular idioms from techno to rock. The latest album of French pianist Alexandre Tharaud, Le Boeuf sur le Toit, sets out to recreate the […]

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New York Rites

Friday, September 21st, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid In Berlin, where contemporary music thrives from the Philharmonie to off spaces, it is a widespread perception that New York’s mainstream institutions are afraid to program anything past Stravinsky. A look at Alan Gilbert’s recent undertakings with the New York Philharmonic, notably in a hugely successful “360” concert of Mozart, Stockhausen, Boulez […]

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Nézet-Séguin performs Epic Romance with the Berlin Philharmonic

Friday, June 22nd, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid Conducting the Berlin Philharmonic is no small feat for a 37-year-old, and Yannick Nézet-Séguin—returning to the orchestra’s podium for the first time since his 2010 debut—had no intention to the make the event a small affair. The newly minted music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, seen at the Philharmonie on June 16, […]

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“We Didn’t Hear the Same Concert”

Wednesday, March 21st, 2012

by Sedgwick Clark That’s a traditional reader complaint. But it happens to critics too. Russian violinist Vadim Repin and Lithuanian pianist Itamar Golan have solid careers, and their program last Saturday evening (3/17) in Alice Tully Hall was an enticing selection of works by Janáček, Ravel, Grieg, and Chausson. From mid-parquet I found Repin’s sound […]

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