a virtual journal and blog of the classical music scene in Boston
Robert Levin, editor; Bettina A. Norton, executive editor; Lee Eiseman, publisher
July 29, 2010
in: Reviews
Boston Midsummer Opera: No Trouble with Tahiti or Chocolate
by Tom Schnauber
On July 28 at the Tsai Performance Center, Boston Midsummer Opera presented two small-scale, seldom-seen operas from the American literature that demonstrated with delectable flair that less is often more. BMO’s enjoyable productions of Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti can be emotionally confusing. That oddly compelling expressive ambiguity was highlighted by baritone Stephen Salters, a good foil for mezzo- rich voice of soprano Sandra Piques Eddy. Lee Hoiby’s Bon Appétit! is its antithesis. His keen sense of theatricality that he did exactly what should be done given the material: create a solid, well-written work of sheer entertainment. Additional performances on July 30, August 1. [Click title for full review.]
July 28, 2010
in: Reviews
Surprising Find of Musical Delights in Plymouth, New Hampshire
by Brian Jones
Last weekend when friends we were visiting invited us to a concert at the New Hampshire Music Festival, it seemed a good idea in the “nothing ventured/nothing gained” department, so we drove over to Plymouth State University on Friday evening, July 23, with open minds.
Beethoven’s Second Symphony under Conductor Andrew Grams was a pleasure to hear, since we’re treated so often to symphonies Three to Nine. Canadian Karen Gomyo’s assured playing of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto was the right kind of virtuosity; it is hard to imagine a more beautiful reading. The program concluded with an energetic, accomplished, and vigorous performance of Rossini’s William Tell Overture. [Click title for full review.]
July 27, 2010
in: Reviews
Master Composer, Great Organist Served Well by Superb Organ’s Pipe Arrangement
by David Griesinger
The concert on July 26 at Cambridge’s First Congregational Church, part of the 17th International Baroque Institute at Longy School, was a combination of delights – a great organist, Peter Sykes, playing (without a page-turner!) works of a master, Johann Sebastian Bach, on a Frobenius, a superb instrument whose pipe arrangement creates a pattern in sound and in space.
Sykes played two mature works, the Partita on O Gott, du frommer Gott, BWV 767 and Liebster Jesu, wir sind Hier, BWV 731 and the great Passacalia and Fugue in C Minor, BWV 582, an early piece. Sykes played with measured freedom, but with enough swing to give the music humanity and life. [Click title for full review.]
July 26, 2010
in: Reviews
Neglected Masterpiece, Rightfully Lesser Works by Major Composers
by Leslie Gerber
On July 25 at Maverick Concerts in Woodstock, NY, Trio Solisti gave outstanding performances of a couple of lesser works by major composers, then brought a relatively neglected masterwork to life. Trio Solisti’s playing of Schumann’s Fantasy Pieces, Op. 88 was precise, warm, and full of the inflection Schumann needs. That this music didn’t fly was the composer’s fault, not the performers’. The style of Trio in G Minor, Op. 8 is recognizably Chopin’s, though this isn’t first-rate Chopin. It’s a pleasure to hear such a big, powerful performance of Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio No. 2, in C Minor, less often played. Go figure. This is top-drawer Mendelssohn. [Click title for full review.]
July 26, 2010
in: Reviews
Stand-up Send-up of Mozart Comedy in the Shed
by Eli Newberger
An uproarious stage performance of Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio on July 23 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra featured sopranos Lisette Oropesa and Ashley Emerson, tenors Eric Cutler and Anthony Stevenson, bass Morris Robinson, and 16 Tanglewood Music Center Vocal Fellows. Nuanced dynamics and supple, responsive string and woodwind playing in the overture made it clear that Mozart was in good hands with conductor Johannes Debus.
For all its buffoonery and sexy lampoonery — underscored by narrator Will LeBow’s shameless emphasis of each and every salacious implication of Simon Buttriss’s hilarious script — the stand-up used send-up of anti-Islamic prejudice to make serious points about our enduring inability to separate person from stereotype. [Click title for full review.]
July 26, 2010
in: Reviews
Beowulf, sung and recited by Benjamin Bagby
by Michael Miller
Benjamin Bagby, who has been performing Beowulf for 20 years, gave a performance in Seiji Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood on July 22. Bagby’s unlocking of its expressive power of is a wonder. The enormity of sound produced in the famous opening word of the poem, Hwaet! (Listen!) showed this was to be a performance on a very large scale, true to the concept of epic. Bagby’s attention to detail makes the verse — and the story — intensely vivid. He combines this with a fine sense of timing and narrative shape, so that it succeeds in musical and dramatic terms as well. And then there is his robust and infectious sense of humor! [Click title for full review.]
July 25, 2010
in: Reviews
Insights into Future Musicians: Tanglewood Composition Fellows
by Mary Wallace Davidson
They laughed on a sultry Saturday afternoon (July 24) when I appeared at Ozawa Hall in Tanglewood for a concert: the end result of the “Piece-a-Day Project” assigned to the six Composition Fellows by Michael Gandolfi, one of the two Resident Artist Composition Faculty members. The six — Shawm Brogan Allison, Lembit Beecher, Ruby Fulton, Eric Nathan, Osnat Netzer, and Nicholas Vines — were required to write one musical work each day for three consecutive days. I hope these composers will hang on to and develop the germs of musical ideas generated here; I felt privileged to experience this stage of their blossoming. [Click title for ful review.]
July 25, 2010
in: Reviews
Better than Ever Muzijevic at Maverick
by Leslie Gerber
Pedja Muzijevic offered an uncommonly varied and satisfying recital at Maverick Concerts in Woodstock on July 24. Interspersing traditional repertoire from Scarlatti to Schumann with 20th-century American piano works, Muzijevic gave satisfying performances and drew many interesting connections. Then, after wasting 4′33″ with silent Cage (a fine opportunity for me to concentrate on my tinnitus), he played Schumann’s Carnaval with an excellent blend of virtuosity and color. It was a rare piano recital as intriguing for its programming as for its performances and gratifying in both. [Click title for full review.]
July 25, 2010
in: Reviews
Wispelwey Gives New Meaning to Playing Ozawa Hall
by Eli Newberger
Pieter Wispelwey’s tour de force at Ozawa Hall on July 22 comprised all six of the J.S. Bach Suites for Unaccompanied Cello, offered in three sets with two intermissions and a single encore. His quiet repeating of the opening Prelude after the well-deserved final ovation gave a sweet symmetry to the evening’s expanding cascades of gorgeous sound, powered and magnified by his intelligent, even experimental exploitation of the hall’s remarkably resonant acoustics. The details of inspiration, imagination, and impulse were on vivid display. There were few clues of flagging energy, and Wispelwey carried the audience with him. [Click title for full review.]
July 24, 2010
in: Reviews
Some Wonders on Winnipesaukee
by Mary Wallace Davidson
On July 22, the “down home” facet of the “Celebrity Series” at Heifetz International Music Institute in Wolfeboro, NH, was provided by A Cellist’s Variations on “Home on the Range by Tom Flaherty. The affable audience loved it. Cellist Amit Peled and pianist Dina Vainshtein’s vigorously dramatic airing of Beethoven’s Sonata No.3 in A Major seemed at cross purposes. There were beautiful solutions to the added weight of the lower sonic range in Schubert’s Quintet in C Major for Two Cellos, played by violinists Daniel Phillips and James Buswell, violist Robert Vernon, and cellists Steven Doane and Rosemary Elliott.
One also wonders why program notes at most musical conservatories omit discussion of the music itself. O well. [Click title for full review.]
July 30, 2010
in: News & Features
Portland, Maine for Sounds, Sights, and Other Sensual Pleasures
by Bettina A. Norton
Fiddleheads from PCMF brochure
It’s difficult not to love every bit of the Maine coastline, but Portland holds a special niche. Recently named the number one place in the country to raise children and in the top 10 “perfect places to live in America,” the city experienced a rejuvenation of its downtown waterfront area, with its superb but previously neglected brick mercantile buildings, in the late 1970s. Twenty years later, a summer classical performance series appeared. The Old Port waterfront restaurants, once limited, are now plentiful and in many cases, superb. In toto, it is a delightful place to spend a summer weekend.
The Portland Chamber Music Festival was founded in 1994 by its Executive Director and Artistic-Co director Jennifer Elowitch and Artistic Co-Director Dena Levine. Elowitch, who taught at New England Conservatory Preparatory School (and is still officially still on the faculty) has lived in Maine, her home state, since 2004. But she continues to be involved with the classical music scene in Boston; she is assistant principal second violin with the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra and often subs for the BSO, serves as a faculty member at Longy School of Music and at the Composers’ Conference at Wellesley, and plays with numerous other chamber music groups. [continued...]
July 28, 2010
in: News & Features
At 70, Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival Goes Historical
by Vance R. Koven
As summer music festivals go, the Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival is doubly unique (so to speak). Not only is it a festival within a festival, housed within the larger framework of the BSO-dominated Tanglewood season and the other chamber and orchestral programs of the Tanglewood Music Center, but it is the only summer festival to be devoted to music of the present. To this one may add another distinguishing feature, its association with a summer school of music for the elite among orchestral and chamber musicians and conductors. (It shares this attribute with Marlboro and to an extent Kneisel Hall and the Heifetz Center, but dwarfs these in scope). And this year, the TCMF, in celebration of its 70th season, is embarking on something that for it, is novel: the programming, curated by the all-star trio of composers Gunther Schuller, John Harbison, and Oliver Knussen, will be almost entirely devoted to an historical retrospective of music composed by the program directors, faculty and Fellows of the TMC over its entire lifetime so far, ranging from founding program director Aaron Copland and other 1940s-era faculty stars like Samuel Barber, Paul Hindemith and Leonard Bernstein, to 21st-century Fellows like Scotland’s Helen Grime. [continued...]
July 22, 2010
in: News & Features
Journeys from Judaism and Persecution in Mendelssohn and Mahler
by Eli Newberger
Gustav Mahler, born into a Jewish family, converted to Roman Catholicism in 1896 in order to preserve his career as a conductor, at a time when anti-Semitism became the norm of Germanic cultural identity and law. (1)
Felix Mendelssohn’s father Abraham, son of the Enlightment philosopher and Jewish sage, Moses Mendelssohn, converted to Lutheranism and added the hyphenation of Bartholdy, the name of a piece of land purchased by his brother-in-law to buffer his Jewish surname. He angrily rebuked his son for calling himself “Felix Mendelssohn” in concert programs in the 1820s:
A name is like a garment; it has to be appropriate for the time, the use, and the rank, if it is not to become a hindrance and a laughing-stock. … There can no more be a Christian Mendelssohn than there can be a Jewish Confucius. If Mendelssohn is your name, you are ipso facto a Jew.
July 16, 2010
in: News & Features
Classical Violinist/Fiddler to Play at Cape Cod Festival Concert
by Jeffrey S. Berman
Those of us who frequent Cape Cod have long been grateful for the presence of the Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival, which brings first-class artists to our summer haunts. Currently under the artistic leadership of pianist Jon Nakamatsu and clarinetist Jon Manasse, this organization appears to be flourishing. Among the concerts this summer is one in Provincetown on Monday, August 9, 2010, (and again on Thursday, August, 12 at the Dennis Union Church) by the Fry Street String Quartet. I am looking forward to this concert not just for the program (see below) but also because I have heard this young quartet mature and gel over the past several years into a distinct musical presence.
The group was organized in Chicago where the address of their first practice venue gave the quartet its name; since 2002 they have been in residence at the Caine School for the Arts at Utah State University in Logan. However, they have local roots, and even roots in the Cape. First violinist William Fedkenheuer is familiar to Bostonians from his tenure as second violin with the Borromeo Quartet, and the Fry Street Quartet has over the past two years made pilgrimages to Wellfleet on the Cape to have coaching with celebrated cellist Bernard Greenhouse. I spoke with Fedkenheuer, a native of Calgary and a former Canadian fiddling champion, about the upcoming concert.
Boston Musical Intelligencer: You were a fiddling champion in Canada; how does that relate to your career as a classical musician?
William Fedkenheuer: I began the violin at age four and was not as excited about the instrument as most loving parents would hope! However, I had a very special teacher who started me on fiddle tunes, and this turned into one of the greatest gifts I’ve received as a violinist. I loved fiddling, and so a deal was struck that I could fiddle as long as I wanted, but the classical building and technical exercises had to be completed first. [continued...]
July 15, 2010
in: News & Features
What should we expect from Summer Festivals?
by Lee Eiseman
A lot has been said in this rag about the superlative qualities of Rockport Music’s new Shalin Liu Center. But how does it compare with what we expect from a summer music venue? For those of us not attending the likes of the Salzburg Festival in our mothball-infused finery, summer festivals mean mosquitoes, moths, straight backed pews, heavy summer air, birdcalls (and even droppings) and various other distractions such as thunder storms, fog horns, surf and imperfect acoustics.
The Shalin Liu Center is an Orphic Temple dedicated to the undisturbed reception of fine music. What the architect, Larry Kierkegaard has said (ad nauseam in the pre-concert fund raising movie) is that “…we want nothing to come between the audience and the music.” His creation is utterly without the grittiness one has previously expected and sometimes endured from summer venues. It is hermetically sealed with perfect air, perfect acoustics and no sense of the world without except for the view, silently delivered through the1inch plate glass stage wall. And that view is both a charm and a curse. For afternoon concerts the resultant glare is a real distraction- indeed a dozen or more viewers wore sunglasses at a recent concert. And the metronomic oscillations of sailboat masts also distracted since they were always set to largo. Yet Shalin Liu has set a new standard for the presentation of chamber music. One is very grateful to hear the music and not the hall.
Concerts at Newport’s Breakers, an opulent Temple dedicated to Mammon, have many of the qualities we love and dread in summer festivals. We like the idea of alternative venues and we make allowances for the concomitant distractions. At the Breakers the doors were open to the veranda allowing the sounds and smells of the sea to infuse the ballroom-sanctum. The air was damp and heavy- jackets were removed and tuning was frequent. Compared to the Shalin Liu Center one heard the sound as if in a marble sarcophagus, and the musicians needed to over-articulate to compensate.
Concerts in such places serve the cause of drawing the un-initiated into the Orphic realm and providing summer jobs for starving artists. And they also add luster to some resort destinations.
July 4, 2010
in: News & Features
Three More Summer Festivals
by Bettina A. Norton
Charlemont Federated Church
Tanglewood and the Newport Music Festival are well known; Mohawk Trails Concerts is new to us. Tanglewood, founded in 1940, and Newport, founded in 1968, offer many concerts, not only in the evenings, but throughout the day, with a variety of times, programs, and venues. Mohawk Trails Concerts, located in Charlemont, MA, offers a far smaller series but very high-quality, unusual programming. All three venues lend themselves to a one-day trip — albeit some of them for those hardy enough to drive back to the Hub “after hours.” [continued...]
June 28, 2010
in: News & Features
Thanks for What? Musing on Praise and Blame
by Vance R. Koven
Every so often, a performer or composer expresses gratitude for a good review or indignance at a bad one. Max Reger’s famous response to a bad review, expressed in a letter to the reviewer, was: “I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. Soon it will be behind me.” We can sympathize with the wounded pride of anyone who has just been publicly impaled in print, and just as easily we can vicariously bask in the warmth of high praise. As a composer, I, like Richard Nixon, prefer winning to losing the critics’ votes. But is it right to give thanks or to spray acid? Is it right for a reviewer to accept thanks — in which case, wouldn’t he or she have to bathe in the acid? [continued...]
June 15, 2010
in: News & Features
The Amazing Sound in Rockport
by David Griesinger
Gorgeous Shalin Liu Performance Center Reveals That Dry & Exciting Tops Muddy & Reverberant for Chamber Music
For the concert by the Parthenia Consort of viols with guest tenor and actor at the new Shalin Liu Performance Center in Rockport on June 13, I chose a seat in row M, just three rows from the back of the stalls, because I wanted to hear the clarity of the sound in an average seat, not a seat reserved for critics. The verdict: Larry Kirkegaard deserves high praise for his work in this hall. It is not easy to create a shoebox hall of this size where the music can be heard clearly in a large majority of seats. [continued...]
June 13, 2010
in: News & Features
Chopin Symposium Features Historic Re-enactment, Newly-Recovered Piece
by Susan Miron
For years, pianist and pedagogue Roberto Poli has found himself intrigued by — if not obsessed with — the music of Frederic Chopin and is now five CDs into his recording project of all of this composer’s music for piano. Poli’s fascination with Chopin, many pianists’ favorite composer for their instrument, has recently resulted in two symposia, a two-day event last June and a much more involved Chopin Symposium this June 18-20 at the Rivers School Conservatory in Weston, Massachusetts where he teaches and co-chairs the piano department (with Angel Ramon Rivera).
This weekend-long event, like its predecessor which drew about 300 people, was to be scheduled every other year, but because 2010 was the bicentenary of Chopin’s birth, he forged ahead and asked a stellar cast — music historians and scholars, pianists and highly regarded local piano pedagogues and performers, to help celebrate the composer again this June. [continued...]