March 13, 2010

in: Reviews

Debut Performances Shine in BLO Ariadne

by Rebecca Marchand

Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos was admirably staged by Boston Lyric Opera on Friday evening, March 12, at the Citi Performing Arts Center Schubert Theater. It is no easy feat to deal with both a libretto and a score that call for symbiosis between high operatic art and commedia dell’arte antics, and The BLO, in the North American premiere of the Welsh National Opera production, presented several brilliant lead roles with a strong ensemble cast.

The effective “backstage” set, designed by Dale Ferguson, highlighted the “all the world’s a stage” moral of the opera itself. But the BLO debut performances of mezzo-soprano Edyta Kulczak as the Composer, soprano Rachele Gilmore as Zerbinetta, and Marjorie Owens as the much-tormented-then-transformed Ariadne were the most captivating of the evening. Joanna Mongiardo (Naiad), Andrea Coleman (Dryad), and Mara Bonde (Echo) shimmered together in their ensemble singing. Owens made the most of Ariadne’s stunning arias, easily negotiating the subtle switches between Ariadne and the Prima Donna, so that by the end of the opera, she truly is the transformed Ariadne. An important facet of the opera, it allows the Prologue and Opera to be part of the same narrative, rather than viewing the former as an explanatory note. Tenor Brandon Jovanovich gave a stirring performance as Bacchus, matched in Wagnerian weight with Owens’ Ariadne, but occasionally sacrificing too much for the sake of power.

Conductor Erik Nielsen aptly navigated the stylistic mélange of the score, giving an almost Stravinskian touch to some of the thinner orchestral sections.          [Click title for full review.]

March 12, 2010

in: Reviews

Splendacious Violin Playing of Hahn with BSO, Frühbeck de Burgos

by David Patterson

Hilary Hahn and the Violin Concerto No. 1 in D, opus 19 by Sergei Prokofiev matched up magically and received quite the response from the crowd at Symphony Hall on Thursday night, March 11. Splendacious violinism persisted all the way into the sustained trills toward the close of the last movement.

An expansive, ethereal world issued forth in the final passages of the Andantino. Here, finally, the orchestra settled in—or maybe just started catching on—as they seemed quiet and not quite there through most of this first movement.

Hahn’s slow and contrapuntal Bach’s Partita No. 3, with which she acknowledged ovations from the audience, had the violin speak in two distinct voices that for a stretch of time achieved spellbinding dialogue.

Guest conductor Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos led the BSO in a brilliantly colored “Scheherazade,” by Rimsky-Korsakov. Tremolos and pizzicatos from the strings created hyper-frenzy to hyper-delicacy. Malcolm Lowe projected his violin solos on the tight side. Cellist Martha Babcock took on arpeggios and melodic motives with grace and warmth. Improvised sounding passages from woodwinds delightfully freed the many predictable flourishes in the suite, morphing them into ear-catching motives. Drama it was not; rather, a high level of orchestral display. In the final climax, brasses were allowed to overpower the strings—and others. Several obvious fluffed entries surprised.

Two orchestrations by the conductor and one by Enrique Fernández Arbós of piano pieces by Isaac Albéniz never lifted off, one reason being that all three selections were on the slow side and just did not work that well together as a group. Hearing the gorgeous harp sound so clearly in all of these pieces was one of the truly refreshing features of the concert.     [Click title for full review.]

March 11, 2010

in: Reviews

Electric Britten, Moving Bruckner from Zander and the NEC Philharmonia

by Christopher Greenleaf

With two intriguing scores, guest conductor Benjamin Zander and the NEC Philharmonia in Jordan Hall on March 10 afforded Boston listeners a rare chance to compare today’s two dominant orchestral lay-outs and to publicly redress an all-but-forgotten cultural-political disharmony from seven decades ago. In 1940, Benjamin Britten accepted a commission from Japan to write a festive work to mark the 2600^thanniversary of the Japanese Empire. Britten submitted a compact, emotionally charged Sinfonia da Requiem. Japan found the overtly Christian section labels insulting and rejected the score. In 1956 the Requiem was at last heard in Japan, with the composer conducting the NHK Symphony, and has been performed there numerous times since.

The orchestra stormed into the first section, establishing a high-energy climate. Every member of the band played with utter conviction and electric musicianship. Even as plangent decibels gave way to an ashen, drained stasis, recurrences of the despairing howls jostled, unsettled, against a disparate new seeking after renewal and comfort.

The Bruckner Fifth Symphony permitted musicians and audience to evaluate the great changes wrought by moving the string divisions and some other instrumental groups around. Where the Britten presented a concentrated, unified wall of sound, especially in fuller passages, the Bruckner gave listeners a transparent, sonically comprehensible overview of all the strands, nearly all the time. The effect of the orchestra’s exceptionally spaciously and majestically bowed Adagio opening of the first movement was curiously negated when Mr. Zander’s uneasily quick and rhythmically uncommitted Allegro toppled an almost religious firmament of possibilities. And the raucous nature of the bold outer Scherzo insisted on so frequent, brutal distensions of the sweet, Ländler-like Trio, that the movement became disjointed. The Zander approach to this was, to my ear, just that much too manic. I should note, though, that I have never succeeded in coming to terms with the organization of this one movement among all the symphonies.         [Click title for full review.]

March 10, 2010

in: Reviews

Musica Viva’s “Ocean Crossings”

by Mary Wallace Davidson

Richard Pittman’s disparate but ultimately organic program for the Boston Musica Viva performance in the Tsai Performance Center on March 5 was the last before the group leaves to perform American music in Kings Place, London. California composers Donald Crockett and Rand Steiger crossed the country from the Pacific to the Atlantic Oceans to speak briefly about their works.

Crockett’s The Cinnamon Peeler is a powerful setting of the sensual poem by Michael Ondaatje (author of The English Patient) for mezzo-soprano, piano, viola, violoncello, flute, and clarinet. Pamela Dellal sang beautifully, standing in the same semi-circle as the instruments; it emphasized that the voice part is on equal footing with them but caused the text to be almost unintelligible until the last two verses.

Steiger’s Elliott’s Instruments (2010), a world première honoring Elliott Carter on his 100th birthday, was commissioned by the Musica Viva with support from the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation. Steiger draws on all of the solo and chamber music that Elliott wrote for these six instruments since 1948. The work emphasizes the individuality of each instrument in turn and in ensemble, using hocket-like techniques to sustain long “melodic” lines; it builds to a fortissimo climax and ends on a beautiful chord you wish to hear a little longer.

The concert also included Twilight Colors (2007) by Chou Wen Chung, for a string trio and two wind trios (flute, oboe, clarinet — the second formed by the same players doubling on different instruments), and the British composer Nicholas Maw’s Ghost Dances (1988), for violin, violoncello, flute, clarinets, and piano, all doubling on folk instruments.

Performers included Ann Bobo, flute, Nancy Dimock, oboe, Bayla Keyes, violin, Peter Sulski, viola, and Robert Schulz, percussion. all superb musicians.                   [Click title for full review.]

March 9, 2010

in: Reviews

Beethoven’s Humor, Despair from Artemis String Quartet

by Larry Phillips

The Artemis String Quartet had a triumphant debut when they played in Jordan Hall on March 5 as part of the Celebrity Series of Boston. They presented a nearly ideal program, quartets from the early, middle and late periods of Beethoven, to a near capacity house. With the cello seated on a platform and the others standing, forming a semi-circle in the middle of the stage, the quartet sounded better and more balanced than other similar ensembles in this acoustic. Although they are German, they played in the Viennese fashion — less severe, say, than the Julliard approach

First up was the second quartet of Op. 18 (actually the third to be composed in this set.) The finale, “Allegro molto quasi Presto,” is a rondo in which humor is predominant. The Quartet in F-Minor, Op. 95 offered an extreme contrast to this exuberance. By then Beethoven was experiencing deafness, financial difficulties and an unhappy love life.

A late quartet, the A Minor, Op. 132, sounds very fragmented at first, but Beethoven manages to keep it organic by motivic ornamentation. The long slow movement is the emotional heart of this quartet. The score is fascinating with Beethoven’s markings, not only the Heiliger Dankgesang but also in the Lydian mode reference. This is key to the movement’s religious tone.

Although Celebrity Series audiences expect encores, Artemis wisely resisted.         [Click title for full review.]

March 9, 2010

in: Reviews

Mostly Magnificent Music Making from Perlman

by Mark Kroll

Itzhak Perlman is considered one of the great violinists of this or any era, and his recital before a packed house at Symphony Hall as part of the Celebrity Series of Boston last Sunday, March 7 reminded us exactly why.

Mozart’s Sonata for Violin and Piano in F major, K. 376. Mozart’s violin sonatas, which come out of the 18th-century tradition of “keyboard sonatas with violin accompaniment,” were conceived as small-scale works, and they may be just a bit too small for Perlman’s big style of playing. Perlman played Franck’s Sonata for Violin and Piano in A major with all the intensity of an excited groom, a romantic-era one at that. There were some delicious 19th-century slides in the second movement, and the superb communication and ensemble between the violinist and his pianist de Silva made this performance of the Franck as good as it gets.

Perlman gave a virtuoso performance of the Sonata, but like in the Mozart, he was sometimes too rough for this elegant French confection. For example, some passages in the first movement were taken at such a fast tempo that much detail got lost and the intonation suffered. Quibbles aside, this was a masterful performance given by two masters of their instruments, both perfectly attuned to each other.   [Click title for full review.]

March 8, 2010

in: Reviews

Ambrosial Perfection, Simmering Fury from Borromeo

by Michael Rocha

The Borromeo String Quartet, faculty quartet-in-residence at the New England Conservatory, shared the Jordan Hall stage Sunday evening, March 7, with three 2010 student Guest Artist Award recipients. The concert also was the Borromeos’ third of an eight-part series featuring the complete string quartet cycle of local contemporary composer Gunther Schuller.

String players Kristopher Tong, violin, Mai Motobuchi, viola, and Yeesun Kim, cello played Mozart’s Oboe Quartet in F Major, K. 370 delicately and expressively, providing a perfectly balanced accompaniment. The overall effect was one of gentle precision. Schuller’s powerful String Quartet No. 3 (1986) was a jarring and riveting musical antithesis of the Mozart, an emphatic yang to Wolfgang’s yin; we had definitely entered film noir territory. Passion and gravitas were dripping all over the stage, tensions built and erupted. This music was dark, sinister, low-pH, and high-energy, and the Borromeo members played with a simmering fury.

From the shimmering tones and soothing triple meter of first movement to the busy, urgent phrases of the final Poco Allegro, Johannes Brahms’s Sextet in G Major, Op. was performed with ambrosial perfection. It featured three Borromeo members juxtaposed with their Guest Artist Award winner/special guest counterparts (Nicholas Kitchen and winner Audrey Wright, violins; Mai Motobuchi and guest Dimitri Murrath, violas; Yeesun Kim and winner Holgen Gjoni, cellos); the round, full-bodied tones of guest cellist Holgen Gjoni were especially notable. In the inordinately rich and vibrant musical scene of Boston, the Borromeo String Quartet is a true stand-out. Is            [Click title for full review.]

March 8, 2010

in: Reviews

Concord Chamber Players with Dicterow, Barker Offer Treats and Trifles

by Vance R. Koven

Concord Chamber Music Society closed its season on March 7 with a program at Concord Academy’s Performing Arts Center, featuring guests Glenn Dicterow, violin, and Edwin Barker, contrabass, with members of the Concord Chamber Players.

Michael Reynolds, cello, and Edwin Barker,  BSO principal bass, played Rossini’s Duo for Cello and Double Bass, written, it is said, for a bibulous dinner party in London, for laughs, but this was high-class clowning on the order of the Harlem Globetrotters: the technical challenges were real enough, at any rate, to put some apparent stress on Mr. Reynolds’s articulation.

The second “little” piece, the Miniatures, of Dvorák, were charming, beautifully played by Dicterow—for 30 years and still counting the New York Philharmonic’s concertmaster, adeptly supported by CCP members Wendy Putnam, violin and Karen Dreyfus, viola. Granted, the D major Duo for two violins by Spohr, op. 67 no. 2, does not plumb vast depths, but it more than justifies its place on a program. Dicterow and Putnam brought it off with style and grace.

The main event on the program was the Dvorák G major Quintet for string quartet and bass. We are happy to take issue with Mr. Ledbetter’s program notes; written in 1875, when the composer was 34, this is not juvenilia, even assuming Dvorák was something of a late bloomer. The performance was spirited, cohesive, and persuasive, though—could this have been an acoustic artifact, since we had the same sense in the Rossini?—the cello, especially in the high range, seemed a few cents short.     [Click title for full review.]

March 10, 2010

in: News & Features

Japan to Accept Britten Score, 70 Years after its Commission

by BMINT STAFF

The Consul General of Japan in Boston, Masaru Tsuji, will be the NEC Philharmonia concert at Jordan Hall this evening [March 10] to receive a copy of the Benjamin Britten score, Sinfonia da Requiem. Originally commissioned by the Japanese government in 1940 for a celebration of the 2600^th anniversary of that country, the composition was, according to Ben Zander, rejected because of its Christian movement titles and was never performed in Japan.

Benjamin Zander, guest conductor of the NEC Philharmonia, notes, “We are deeply moved by Britten’s composition and by the grace of Japan’s esteemed diplomatic representative in receiving the score 70 years after the event.”

Dear Mr Tsuji,

I received your message through your assistant, Ms Hansen and I wish to reply with great respect and affection for a new friend.

I think I have managed to unravel the story of the Britten work. [continued...]

March 7, 2010

in: News & Features

Explanation of Clarity versus Reverberation in Concert Acoustics

by David Griesinger

In his review here in the Intelligencer of the recent recital by violinist Thomas Zehetmair at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Christoph Wolff mentioned that the acoustics in the Stephen D. Bechtel Auditorium, designed primarily for symposia and lectures, “…was remarkably good in every respect. ” Wolff’s comment deserves some expansion on the whole question of acoustics.

The Bechtel auditorium is very well designed for its purpose. The audience sits in semicircles around the podium, forming a wide fan. There is ample space behind the performer, and the back of the stage is filled by a moderately sound-absorbing projection screen. The seats are upholstered with sound-absorbing fabric, and there are carpets in the aisles. The high ceiling gives an unusually large internal volume for a speech auditorium, and the extra volume increases the reverberation time sufficiently that there is a noticeable, although quiet, reverberation — under one second. Reverberation is audible, but at a low enough sound pressure that it does not obscure the music in any way. The music, even eight rows back, is as clear as if one were standing next to the performer. The net result is an exciting, highly engaging, concert experience, increasingly unusual in concert venues. [continued...]

March 5, 2010

in: News & Features

Emmanuel Church Celebrates Institution of New Rector with Special Offering from Emmanuel Music

by BMINT STAFF

BMInt  interviewed composer and Emmanuel Music director, John Harbison, and the Rev. Pamela L. Werntz, who is to be instituted as rector this Sunday. The 10:00 AM regular service will include Bach’s Cantata No. 163 in English, and a motet by James Primosch.  The 3:00 PM special service of institution will feature a repeat of the Primosch. Your correspondents also recalled the Rev. Al Kershaw, Emmanuel Church’s rector enthusiastically encouraging the  founding of Emmanuel Music. The incoming rector is also deeply committed to music, especially the music of Bach.

The interview with John Harbison:

BMInt: We recall that a former rector, the Rev. Al Kershaw, presided over Emmanuel when Craig Smith conceived the idea of the special music program.

Craig was a tenor in the choir at the time. The music director faltered, radically, and Craig took over the choir. And within a few weeks, he went to Al with the idea of doing a Bach Cantata series.

He had been coming to Cantata Singers concerts — back when I was conducting, and I had just gotten to know him because he lived across the street from me. …

He got the series going in ‘70 or ‘71. At the first performance, Rosie [Harbison's wife] and I both played. Jane Bryden sang… It was in a period when much of the time, the congregation was meeting at Lindsey [Chapel], very small-scale. Quite soon, I think the second year, Craig decided to do it every week. Al was fine with it.  Then Craig augmented the chorus quickly with some other singers.

BMInt: Do you think the Bach Cantatas have helped increase the congregation?

I think they did, I think Al thought they did, very much so.  Bach cantatas, and the Jazz ministry, were very beneficial.

BMInt: Al was a jazz musician, right? [continued...]

February 28, 2010

in: News & Features

The Monteverdi Orfeo Film: Spectacular, Surreal, Stylish

by Bettina A. Norton

A film presentation of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, directed by René Jacobs and staged by the Trisha Brown Company at the Auditorium of the Louvre au Dimanche 21 février was sold out, my husband and I were told, but a quickly presented card from Boston Musical Intelligencer worked magic. The staff was delighted at the offer to write up something for Boston classical-music lovers.

So I was nonplussed to discover that this presentation was hardly au courant; it originally was seen at Théatre Royale de la Monnaie in Brussels under artistic director Bernard Foccroule in 1998, followed with a performance at the festival in Aix-en-Provence. Nonetheless, as it turns out when we returned to Boston and asked more than a dozen local music lovers (so far), almost no one even knew of it. Quelle domâge. [continued...]

February 22, 2010

in: News & Features

A Birthday Note

by Mark DeVoto

On February 22 I celebrate Chopin’s birthday, not George Washington’s.  Two hundred years ago today, one of the greatest Romantic geniuses was born near Warsaw, of French and Polish parentage.  His amazing talents were already apparent when he was eight years old.  By the time he was 16 he was writing music of permanent value, and the best masters in Poland said they had no more to teach him.

Chopin’s style was influenced by those he adored most — Bach and Mozart — and by Polish folk music, but in every sense is uniquely his own,  Its classical refinement resulted in a higher proportion of excellence and a lower proportion of inferior work than in the case of any other great composer.  Though he could not match them in output, Chopin had a melodic gift as great as Mozart’s or Schubert’s.  Of all the major composers his arena was the most limited: except for 6 solos with orchestra, some chamber music and some songs, his entire corpus consists of about 250 pieces for solo piano.  These works form the core of the Romantic piano repertory and include much of the most poetically subtle music of all time.  The unparalleled originality of Chopin’s harmonic language influenced a centuryful of composers from Schumann and Wagner to Rachmaninoff and Debussy and continues to be felt today.

Chopin said that he didn’t understand Beethoven, but on the evidence of his successful struggles with the sonata form, he understood enough.  The process of “symphonic” development by relentless application of repeated motives suited the Austro-German tradition, but it didn’t suit Chopin.  It sufficed him to devise his own approach to narrative structure that is perfectly original, idiosyncratic, and valid.  He achieved triumphs in the larger genres fully as well as in the miniatures for which he was most famous in his own time.  The vivid pianism of his youthful concertos (he wrote both at age 19) completely overcomes their orchestral weaknesses.  The improvisatory qualities of the scherzos and ballades define a visionary world that no later composer could approximate; the sui generis forms of the F minor Fantasy, the Barcarolle, and the Polonaise-Fantaisie, mighty monuments from Chopin’s last years, show that he was at the height of his powers when he died of tuberculosis at 39.  We are still learning from his example, singing his nocturnes, and dancing with his 56 mazurkas.  Happy 200th Birthday, Fryderyk Chopin, beloved master and greatest of composers for the piano.

February 16, 2010

in: News & Features

Is Classical Music Radio A Dying Technology?

by Richard Buell

WGBH’s spokesman, John Voci may be unintentionally right according to a BMInt commenter. The future for classical music broadcasting may be on the internet rather than from 100,000 watt radio towers, which, because of their cost of operation, require lowest common denominator programming. Richard Buell, a former Boston Globe critic, has a comprehensive website on streaming classical music here. His comment, which follows, is part of a lively discussion at the end of an earlier article .

Have you ever wondered what can classical music radio be like far, far away from dear provincial little Boston? If you’ll give me your attention …

Across the Channel from France Musique — which Joel Cohen rightly praises — you hear such offerings as BBC Radio 3’s CD Review, whose regular Building a Library feature amounts to a vivid critical discography in sound. Whose recording, say, of Schumann’s Kerner Lieder is THE one to have? One Saturday morning a few months back that wonderful writer Hilary Finch (of Gramophone and the Times) was on hand (and for an hour!) to go through the whole lot of available recordings.

There is nothing remotely like this on U.S. radio stations, and to the best of my knowledge there never has been. [continued...]

February 13, 2010

in: News & Features

Metropolis with Original Music, at the Berlin Film Festival

by Trobador

A Report from Europe: Will success spoil Gottfried Huppertz?

This was the question running through Trobador’s mind as he, along with a certain number of other European spectators, tuned in to an unusual television program last Friday on the Franco-German channel Arte. It transmitted the “première” of a legendary film, Metropolis (1927) of director Fritz Lang, restored to its original two-and-a-half hours. This was shown before a live audience, with a full, well-rehearsed orchestra performing from the original Gottfried Huppertz (1887-1937) score, edited by the German conductor-musicologist, Bernd Heller. Given the short run of the original film with its original score, in 1927,  more people have probably heard the music this week than at any time since its composition (although I am told on good authority that the score can be heard on two-year-old DVD produced by the Murnau Stifftung.) [continued...]