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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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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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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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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by Sedgwick Clark Shaham’s 1939 Dark Horse Gil Shaham had an epiphany. After years of recognition as one of the brightest young lights of the concert circuit, the Israeli-American violinist conjured one of the most imaginative programming concepts in years. He had been struck by how many violin concertos written in the 1930s had entered [...]
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by Sedgwick Clark Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic are on a European tour for a couple of weeks, and for a change I didn’t roll my eyes in despair when I saw the list of repertoire. His predecessors as music director, Kurt Masur and Lorin Maazel, for all their superb work at building [...]
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by Sedgwick Clark In their wildest dreams, the six string quartets couldn’t have asked for more. Nor could music lovers, as the Manhattan School of Music rang in the New Year with what it called the “Inaugural Robert Mann String Quartet Institute.” Yes, this is why I left Muncie, but this time my hometown friends [...]
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by Sedgwick Clark Lincoln Center’s attempt to add variety to Mostly Moz is just fine with me, especially if the variety is Stravinsky. Audiences seem to agree too, for a Saturday afternoon of Stravinsky films and two concerts of his chamber music by the spiffy International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) were packed. The first of the [...]
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by Sedgwick Clark We’ve been in the thrall of “perfect” playing for so long that sometimes it takes a less than precise ensemble to remind us of genuine character. The Royal Danish Orchestra, under its music director Michael Schønwandt, had it in spades last week in its delightful program of native son Carl Nielsen’s strange [...]
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