a virtual journal and blog of the classical music scene in Boston
Robert Levin, advisor; Bettina A. Norton, emerita editor; Lee Eiseman, publisher
June 18, 2013
in: Reviews
Singing, Dancing and Drinking at BEMF
by Benjamin Pesetsky
Tragicomedia brought some late night life to Jordan Hall on Saturday with “Singen, Spielen, Tanzen, Trinken”—effectively a Boston Early Music Festival revue show of 17th-century music from Germany, Italy, and France. [continued]
June 18, 2013
in: Reviews
Pawel Izdebski in Song
by Geoffrey Wieting
Against competing iconography it takes performers of great charisma to keep listeners’ attention; it was the signal achievement three singers with pianist Yelena Beriyeva to do this in the sumptuous main hall of Somerville’s Museum of Modern Renaissance where Commonwealth Lyric Theater presented a recital of songs and arias on Saturday. [continued]
June 18, 2013
in: Reviews
BEMF Orchestra Triumphs at Jordan
by Jacob Street
Curmudgeonly composer Jean-Baptiste Lully would apparently break violins “across the backs” of musicians who played his notes incorrectly, though such authentic performance practice was not necessary for BEMF Orchestra’s Jordan Hall concert on Thursday. [continued]
June 17, 2013
in: Reviews
Viva Verdi! Viva Rockport!
by Janine Wanée
Clouds parted Friday evening June 12th to provide the Rockport Chamber Music Festival audience with the perfect seaside setting for a Romantic chamber program of Verdi. Verdi is essential for Italian opera lovers, but much less so for chamber music audiences. [continued]
June 17, 2013
in: Reviews
French Fête Features Flowers, Furies, Fantômes
by John Ehrlich
BEMF Chamber Opera offerings were two interrupted and in these performances fascinatingly conjoined works by Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643-1704): the charming pastorales La Couronne de Fleurs and La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers. There was much to enchant the attendees at Jordan Hall this past Saturday evening, just as there will be for those within the Rockport Music Festival’s seaside Shalin Liu Performance Center tonight. [continued]
June 17, 2013
in: Reviews
Sykes Curates BEMF Keyboard Recitals
by David Moran
At the Museum of Fine Arts last Friday and employing four historical instruments from its fine collection, recitals for harpsichord, then fortepiano, then clavichord—took place, under the rubric “The Youthful Keyboard: Inspiration and Instruction.” [continued]
June 17, 2013
in: Reviews
Paul Leenhouts and The Royal Wind Music
by David Schulenberg
Sunday’s offering by The Royal Wind Music, the final concert of the 2013 Boston Early Music Festival, reflected the tradition of ad hoc re-arrangement of music written for other instruments. The ensemble of 13 recorder players was directed and arranged by Paul Leenhouts. [continued]
June 16, 2013
in: Reviews
Brilliance and Reserve from Meyers and Nel
by Brian Schuth
Violinist Anne Akiko Meyers came to the Rockport Chamber Music Festival Saturday night in the company of pianist Anton Nel with a curiously unambitious program delivered with formidable technique: The crowd was pleased. [continued]
June 16, 2013
in: Reviews
Chalumeau Shines for Aston Magna
by Brian Schuth
Aston Magna, America’s oldest summer early music festival, opened its 41st season on Friday at Slosberg Auditorium at Brandeis University with “The Art of the Chalumeau.” The festival proved it can still offer surprise and revelation to audiences. [continued]
June 16, 2013
in: Reviews
Hilliard’s [Swan]Songbook?
by Cashman Kerr Prince
Friday’s BEMF outing at Emmanuel Church was a stellar showcase indeed of The Hilliard Ensemble’s manifold talents in early music from Western, Slavonic and Armenian traditions. “A Hilliard Songbook” offered secular and sacred music in the most-direct, least-mediated, highest-caliber way possible. [continued]
June 15, 2013
in: Reviews
Rockport’s Wagner (and Bruckner) Variety Show
by Joseph E. Morgan
Thursday’s Rockport Music concert of Richard Wagner’s chamber music (with the addition of Anton Bruckner’s Quintet in F major) in celebration of his 200th birthday, was a pastiche in which talented performers rendered one-work-each of a composer whose primary talents resided mostly in other genres. [continued]
June 15, 2013
in: Reviews
Kenny’s Lute Dark but not Drear
by Jacob Street
Elizabeth Kenny’s lute playing so drew in the listener that, by the end of her opening chords on Wednesday night, one could not imagine a sound more rich and robust in the cavernous Emmanuel Church. [continued]
June 14, 2013
in: Reviews
Newberry Consort’s Cantigas Concert
by Joel Cohen
Spanish King Alfonso X, called “El Sabio” —the Wise (1221-1284) collected more than 400 sacred songs to the Virgin Mary, the celebrated Cantigas de Santa Maria. The Newberry Consort performed certain of the Cantigas for the Boston Early Music Festival in Jordan Hall yesterday. [continued]
June 14, 2013
in: Reviews
BEMF: Atalante, In carmine dolore
by Cashman Kerr Prince
With candles lighted in the darkened sanctuary of Emmanuel Church last night, Atalante’s singers clothed in the style of Caravaggio assumed sung tableaux vivants in classical and Biblical laments from 17th-century Rome. [continued]
June 14, 2013
in: Reviews
Three Organists Play Bach for BEMF
by David Schulenberg
BEMF’s Sixth Organ “Mini-Festival” took place Thursday at Boston’s First Lutheran Church wherein three organists contributed recitals under the general heading “The Genius of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750).” [continued]
June 13, 2013
in: Reviews
Beethoven & the Piano on the Fringe
by Marvin J. Ward
Christopher Greenleaf has created a “Composers & the Piano” series and organized Fringe performances focusing on a single late-18th and early 19th-composer: Schubert two years ago, and yesterday, Beethoven at Boston’s Church of the Covenant. [continued]
June 13, 2013
in: Reviews
BEMF: Master & Student
by Cashman Kerr Prince
Philippe Pierlot, bass viol, and Lorenzo Ghielmi, harpsichord, in a concert of 17th- and 18th-century music, explored French and German musical traditions across generations yesterday afternoon at Emmanuel Church. [continued]
June 13, 2013
in: Reviews
Remarkable Nuance from Kirkby and O’Dette
by Geoffrey Wieting
In Jordan Hall last night, the Boston Early Music Festival presented Emma Kirkby and Paul O’Dette, bewitching the capacity audience with Dowland’s songs and lute solo pieces. [continued]
June 13, 2013
in: Reviews
“Resonance” Takes the Stage at BEMF
by Donald Teeters
There were five fine singers on stage in Jordan Hall on Wednesday evening, only one of whose lips moved. Fabio Bonizzoni brought a small contingent of his Italian early music group, La Risonanza, for an almost all-Handel program as part of the currently unfolding Boston Early Music Festival. [continued]
more reviews →June 12, 2013
in: News & Features
Rockport Music Tributes to Wagner and Verdi
by Joseph E. Morgan
Wagner by C. Willich
In a year full of celebrations for the 200th anniversary of the birth of opera composers Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi, the Rockport Chamber Music Festival is offering a unique celebration this Thursday and Friday that stands apart from the rest by presenting a selection chamber works from these composers, offering, in the words of Artistic Director David Deveau, the “…audience a side of each giant rarely encountered.”
On Thursday, the concert “Wagner at 200 (and Bruckner at 189),” features a program of works that Wagner dedicated to two important and controversial women in his life, Mathilde Wesendonck and Cosima Wagner. [continued...]
June 12, 2013
in: News & Features
Monadnock Region Resounds with Chamber Music
by BMINT STAFF
Jaffrey Centre Meeting House
The ambitious, two-year-old Electric Earth Concerts presents an intriguing chamber program of two works this Saturday evening, June 15th at 7:30 pm at First Church in Jaffrey NH: Russian violinist Dmitry Sitkovetsky’s string trio arrangement of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and American composer Stephen Hartke’s King of the Sun: Tableaux for piano and strings. The transcribed Bach features Horszowski Trio violinist Jesse Mills and cellist Raman Ramakrishnan joined by violist Jonathan Bagg, Electric Earth Concerts co-artistic director (and Duke professor). For the Hartke this threesome will be augmented by Horszowski Trio pianist Rieko Aizawa.
Bagg describes Sitkovetsky’s recasting of Bach’s “infinitely imaginative counterpoint” as a “vivid three-voice chamber music setting that has delighted audiences since it was published in the mid-’80s.” Even more vivid to some ears is “King of the Sun,” which is, as Bagg notes, “both whimsical and serious … derived from diverse inspirations, including an anonymous medieval canon and the painter Joan Miro.” [continued...]
June 10, 2013
in: News & Features
La Risonanza in Boston Debut
by BMINT STAFF
Fabio Bonizoni (file photo)
The renowned ensemble La Risonanza will make its BEMF debut in “Handel: from England to Italy,” featuring the soprano Roberto Invernizzi on Wednesday, June 12th at 8pm in Jordan Hall, in an offering comprising three Handel cantatas from his early Italian period, two trio sonatas, and a Passacaglia variata by Michele Mascitti. The ensemble’s founder and director, the harpsichordist Fabio Bonizoni, explains to BMInt readers:
Tamar Hestrin Grader: Your program for BEMF is Handel with Mascitti in the middle. Mascitti is not nearly as familiar to the audience here in Boston as Handel. Could you tell us about him? [continued...]
June 8, 2013
in: News & Features
Mozart On His Own Instruments: BEMF and WGBH
by Tamar Hestrin Grader
Perhaps the instrument we will hear.
Among the splendors and delights of the Boston Early Music Festival, two of Mozart’s own instruments—his concert violin and his viola—will appear in Boston courtesy of the Mozarteum Foundation of Salzburg. This is a first for the United States. If you wish to see them up close, they will be on display for the first three hours of the Festival Exhibition, from 10am to 1pm on Wednesday the 12th of June, in the Revere Hotel. If you wish to hear them—and the chance to hear Mozart’s own instruments is surely not to be passed over lightly—there will be a performance at 8pm on Monday the 10th in Jordan Hall. Amandine Beyer, making her Festival on the violin, and Miloš Valent will play the viola. They will be joined by Kristian Bezuidenhout on fortepiano, and Eric Hoeprich on clarinet. The all-Mozart program is as follows: Sonata for violin and piano in C Major, K. 303 (293c); Prelude and Fugue for piano solo in C major, K. 394; Trio for clarinet, viola, and fortepiano in E-flat Major, “Kegelstatt”, K. 498; Duo for violin and viola in G major, K. 423; Sonata for violin and piano in D major, K. 306. There will be a talk before the performance (starting at 6:30pm), with the President and the Head of Research from the Mozarteum Foundation, Johannes Honsig-Erlenburg and Ulrich Leisinger. WGBH is also sponsoring a live broadcast around these instruments—see the last paragraph. [continued...]
June 7, 2013
in: News & Features
Beyond BEMF: Fringe Concerts to Commence June 9
by BMINT STAFF
The Boston Early Music Festival Fringe Concerts (running this year from June 9th to June 15th) have been part of BEMF since the very first Festival in 1981. BEMF itself was modeled after the great Early Music festivals of our European counterparts—festivals where “fringe” events running alongside the main festival events were a popular and much anticipated aspect of the festival-going experience. BEMF’s Fringe Concerts, originally conceived and referred to as Concurrent Events highlight and lift up (primarily) local, up-and-coming Early Music artists and ensembles. The term “fringe concert” denotes concerts that are entirely artist-produced from beginning to end, running in parallel with the official festival events, as opposed to concerts that present works which exist on the fringe of the Early Music era. [continued...]
June 6, 2013
in: News & Features
Byrd Ensemble—back in Boston
by Steven Ledbetter
In October 2011 a specialist early music chorus from Seattle made its first Boston appearance on a Sunday afternoon filled with musical events in Boston, only to find that their appearance was all-but unnoticed. I reviewed the Byrd Ensemble very enthusiastically, and I write about them now to draw attention to their forthcoming program in the Fringe Series of the Boston Early Music Festival (Sunday June 9 at 7:30 pm, First Church, Boston).
The Byrd Ensemble was assembled by a Seattle singer Markdavin Obenza, has been singing since boyhood, first in the Seattle Northwest Boychoir and had small parts in Seattle opera productions, such as the shepherd boy whose offstage voice opens the last act of Tosca. Like many of the singers in the group, he had years of experience in Episcopal cathedral choirs (just as so many of the top British early music singers have done). And he took a master’s degree in music theory at the University of Washington. [continued...]
June 3, 2013
in: News & Features
Rachmaninoff’s Aleko: Passionately Revived
by Geoffrey Wieting
The Iconic Russian Master
A precocious graduation exercise from a gifted teenager, Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Aleko is an object of curiosity to opera aficionados as well as to lovers of Russian music generally, for few people in this country have heard it except, perhaps, on recording. The Commonwealth Lyric Theater (CLT) will present what is thought to be the opera’s first complete performance on the East Coast since 1916, in four performances at Brighton’s Center Makor on June 9th-13th. In fact, the great Russian operatic repertoire itself, largely neglected in the U.S. through much of the 20th-century, has only recently been making a comeback, due in part to the international success of the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev and a number of Slavic opera stars. Furthering this resurgence locally are the passionate pair of artists overseeing this new production, Alexander Prokhorov and Olga Lisovskaya, of whom more later. [continued...]
May 31, 2013
in: News & Features
BEMF Brings Castile to the Cutler
by BMINT STAFF
A youngish Händel
The centerpiece for this year’s Boston Early Music Festival is, no doubt, the authentically staged first opera and first published work of (then) Georg Friedrich Händel, his Almira, Königin von Kastilien oder Der in Krohnen erlangte Glückswechsel (The Change of Fortune Gained with a Crown). First performed in Hamburg in January 1705, it will be receiving its Boston premiere at the Cutler Majestic on June 9th in a production running through June 16th in Boston before continuing at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington from June 21st to the 23rd.
BMInt recently spoke about the production with eminent historian, stage director and designer Gilbert Blin. [continued...]
May 28, 2013
in: News & Features
Transition at CpM
by Laura Stanfield Prichard
Betsy Burleigh (file photo)
This has been a year of celebration and transition for Boston’s historic, 80-voice Chorus pro Musica. CpM’s season will conclude with Betsy Burleigh’s celebratory last appearance as director. On May 31st at Jordan Hall she will conduct two work: the “Great” Mass in C Minor by Mozart featuring soprano Kristen Watson, mezzo-soprano Krista River, tenor David Won, baritone Andrew Garland and also The New England Philharmonic, followed by Peter Child’s Meditations Upon The Lamb for baritone [Andrew Garland], chorus, piano, harp and strings based on three texts: Blake’s “The Lamb,” Ted Hughes’s “Orf” and the liturgical Agnus Dei. Ticket information is here. [continued...]
more news & features →