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Newer Articles →April 27, 2010
The Coming of Light: Winsor Music Premieres Lieberson
On April 25, The Winsor Quartet (Peggy Pearson, oboe; Randy Hiller, violin; Drew Ricciardi, viola; Tony Rymer, cello) featured refreshing interpretations of Beethoven and Bach as well as the Boston premiere of Peter Lieberson’s cycle, The Coming of Light. Among featured musicians were tenor Frank Kelley, baritone Sumner Thomson, soprano Kasey Fahy, and the Boston Children’s Chorus led by director Anthony Trecek-King.
Beethoven’s Quintet in C major, Op. 29 was arranged to include the oboe — for the most part, replacing a violin. The oboe gives a beautiful new timbral element to the piece and illuminates some of the inner-voice counterpoint with an interesting coloristic gleam.
Peter Lieberson’s The Coming of Light was co-commissioned by Winsor Music and the Chicago Chamber Musicians for the centennial of the dedication of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple. Set to two poems each by John Ashbery, Shakespeare, and Mark Strand for baritone, oboe, and string quartet, it relies more on ideas of impermanence and love. Sumner Thomson’s voice fit the ensemble and the composition perfectly. The performers were constantly engaged (even when the music was not engaging). Pearson’s lyricism as lines between the oboe and baritone mingled was definitely a highlight of the evening.
The Bach Cantata 159, “Sehet, wir gehen hinauf gen Jerusalem” pulled the full forces of the evening’s performers together, with the addition of Kasey Fahy, Jazimina MacNeil, Kelley, and Boston Children’s Chorus. Thompson’s enchanting and powerful voice was most enthralling when set against mezzo MacNeil’s euphoric placid tone, which meshed perfectly with the oboe in the second aria and chorale. The Chorus provided wonderful depth to the closing chorale and a powerful finale to the evening. [Click title for full review.]
April 22, 2010
BCMS and Krista River take on Röntgen, Mozart, Mendelssohn with Lyricism and Character
The Boston Chamber Music Society performed a program of Mozart, Röntgen, and Mendelssohn for a sizable and responsive audience in Sanders Theatre on Sunday, April 18. The conversational underpinning of Mozart’s Piano Quartet in E-flat major, K. 493 relies heavily on a pianist who can convincingly construct a pronounced, and sometimes domineering, character. Mihae Lee carried this role with brilliance and conviction. The rest of the ensemble also displayed a strong ability to recognize comic gestures in the music. While the Allegro and Allegretto well delivered, if at times inarticulate, the Larghetto was undoubtedly the most successful movement of the three, exhibiting a near-perfect sense of pacing and expressive vitality.
Mezzo-soprano Krista River gave a stunning performance Röntgen’s Lyrische Gänge for voice, viola, and piano to poems by Friedrich Theodor Vischer.. Her resonant, rich voice had palpable substance, seeping into the walls with each lyrical line. Her dramatic pacing was dead-on for the second song, Stille, with potent and impassioned lyricism that debunks the antiquated notion that German cannot be an inherently beautifully sung language. The viola and voice often seemed disconnected, however: a symptom of some truly terrible writing for viola. Despite some truly beautiful harmonies and lush, expressive vocal writing, Lyrische Gänge is little more than bad Brahms.
Mendelssohn’s String Quintet in B-flat major provided the most consistent and polished performance of the evening. The Allegro vivace was tightly knit, filled with contrasting disposition to the Andante scherzando and convincingly portrayed by the animated performance of violinists Ida Levin and Harumi Rhodes. Cellist Astrid Schween shone beautifully in a gripping, dynamic performance of the Adagio e lento. [Click title for full review.]
April 13, 2010
Community Music Center’s Beethoven Cycle Culminates with the Mighty Ninth
with contributions from Peter Van Zandt Lane
The cycle of Beethoven symphonies in piano transcriptions in a series of free concerts that form part of CMCB’s centennial celebration concluded on Thursday, April 8 in CMCB’s Allen Hall, with the colossal Ninth Symphony in an arrangement by Otto singer for two pianos, soloists and chorus. The pianists were CMCB faculty members Stephen Yenger and Shoko Hino; the chorus was the CMCB’s resident adult community choir Una Voce, under the leadership of Samuel Martinborough. The other singers comprised a quartet of soloists and a quintet, both largely drawn from members of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus (and who are mostly also active freelancers in the region). The soloists were Pamela Wolfe, soprano, Cindy Vredeveld, mezzo, Martin Thomson, tenor, and Michael Pritchard, bass-baritone. The quintet consisted of Christine Pacheco Duquette and Susan Cavalieri, sopranos, Louse-Marie Mennier, alto, Martin Mulligan, tenor, and Tim Wilfong, baritone. The musical part of the program was preceded by a brief lecture by Mary Greer, a New York-based choral director and musicologist.
The duo pianists in this performance were well coordinated with each other, and they plainly have the chops to get through this big piece. It’s a bit unfortunate that they didn’t take the exposition repeat in the first movement, which most orchestral performances nowadays do, and their tempo in the outer sections of the scherzo was a bit on the slow side. On the other hand(s), they were very effective in conveying and clarifying the contrapuntal play throughout the work. What one really missed, though, was the poetry of the piece: the collaborators did not come to an understanding of the expressive arc of the symphony, most vividly observable in the slow movement, whose “cantabile” heading seems to have gotten lost in translation. [Click title for full review.]
March 8, 2010
Boston Modern Orchestra Project: Strings Attached
The Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) presented its third full concert of the season at Jordan Hall on March 6 in an extensive, fairly eclectic program of music for string orchestra. Nathan Ball’s Stained Glass, a world premiere, an amalgam of American post-minimalist and European spiritual minimalist styles, was quite enjoyable, though limited by a rather strict, at times uninventive harmonic language; it developed musical ideas successfully despite being on the short side.
Israeli composer Betty Olivero’s Neharót, Neharót was beautiful, disturbing, comforting, mystifying, and alien all at once– and without doubt the most impassioned performance of the evening. The most effective moments of Scott Wheeler’s Crazy Weather came in the more freely composed Adagio, as the music slowly and mysteriously gained a sense of motion from its suspended, frozen beginning. The third movement, “Steadily Driving,” at times seemed lacking in the motivation and intensity that the piece required – a very rare symptom for an ensemble with the versatility and performance standards of BMOP.
Hartke’s Alvorada, Three Madrigals seemed to press some of its most intriguing moments into the second movement, with overt melodiousness both strange and familiar. The third movement, “Bailada,” developed a wonderfully elaborate dance out of very simple materials, culminating in a surprising and pleasantly awkward coda reminiscent of Hindemith.
No easy feat, Gil Rose and BMOP were able to breathe life into Milton Babbitt’s Correspondences, among some of the most difficult (both practically and conceptually) music written in the 20th century and a piece that is most often interpreted with cold precision. The program closed with a fantastic performance of Bartók’s Divertimento, one of the finest compositions of the period. [Click title for full review.]
February 11, 2010
Collage New Music Brings New Perspectives on America’s Pulse
Collage New Music, led by director David Hoose, presented an eclectic selection of 21st-century chamber works on Monday evening, February 8, at Pickman Hall of the Longy School of Music. Featuring four substantial pieces from four well-established contemporary composers Arlene Sierra, Sebastian Currier, Chen Yi, and Steven Mackey, the ensemble displayed a top-tier performance standard throughout the program. All but Chen Yi’s works were receiving their first Boston performance. Hoose was inclined to share with the audience an exploration of American musical identity, and after some stream-of-consciousness pondering on the subject, affirmed that it is some general sense of pulse that unites the canon of 20th and 21st century American music. All of the composers featured on the program (who, Hoose claims, identify themselves primarily as American composers) present their own distinct integration of pulse into their pieces. [Click title for full review.]
January 24, 2010
With Conviction and Character, Muir String Quartet Continues Beethoven Cycle
In their fourth installment of a cycle of Beethoven’s string quartets, the Muir String Quartet once again offered a virtuoso representation of each period of one of the most celebrated composers of all time. Wednesday’s concert, January 20, featured Quartets in E-Flat Major, Op. 74; G Major, Op. 18 No. 2; and C-Sharp Minor, Op. 131. As with each of the Muir’s concerts in this series, the group has opted to take an approach that highlights the stylistic variety of Beethoven’s life works rather than a consecutive approach.
The evening’s performances became unique characters, the ensemble placing various traits–tranquility and intensity, motion and suspension, delicacy and grit—in all the right places. The Muir’s performance of the C-sharp minor quartet, which contains one of the most inspired, complicated, and elegant webs of musical development in the canon of 19th-century music, was done with such precision that all the inner complexities of the structure seemed to illuminate themselves as the piece unfolded–a phenomenon that can only occur when the ensemble possesses the dedication to apply a vast theoretical understanding of the composition to its practice.
[Click title for full review.]
January 14, 2010
Wednesday Night at the Improv
It’s hard to know where to begin describing, much less evaluating, concerts of the type your correspondent attended on January 13 at Central Congregational Church in Jamaica Plain. There were two groups represented, one quartet, The Meltdown Incentive, and the duo rare degree (lower case intentional and hence heretofore in italics), two Americans now resident in Amsterdam. TMI specializes in improvisation; its members move between the classical and jazz worlds, as their performance suggested. Improvisatory activity played a notable role in rare degree‘s program as well.
TMI presented a set of seven soi-disant haiku by George Swede that evoke an overall sense of solitude, sometimes desolation, possibly alienation, ending with the tiniest suggestion of hope, then Thomas Hardy’s Neutral Tones, beginning with a traditionally lyrical tune and expanding to a more diversified soundscape of watercolor washes, rather Takemitsu-like. The last two works, the first based on Wednesday’s horoscope for Capricorns pulled from MSNBC’s web site, and the second from Instyle.com’s beauty tips called 10 Ways to Wake Up Beautiful, were, as you might expect, played for laughs, and with a heavier dose of obviously jazz inflections.
The performances were all high quality: Ms. Bielanski has a lovely, plummy mezzo when she invokes it, and Mr. Brunel, mostly on bass clarinet treated, to quote Judith Weir, as “a hysterical treble instrument with a surprise bass extension,” exhibited sure command of all his extended and unextended techniques. Broms and Case likewise provided solid contributions and support.
While not explicitly an improvisatory group, rare degree programmed some into its grouping, Ms. Jessen’s In Flux, the public premiere of Peter Van Zandt Lane’s Triptiek, Matthew Burtner’s SXueAk, Judith Shatin’s Grito del Corazon, and Terry Riley’s Dorian Reeds, the latter of which, dating fro 1964, must surely constitute early music by this group’s standards. Our BMInt colleague Peter Van Zandt Lane’s partly improvisational work opens with a “big band” jazzy flourish followed by busy figuration and surprising lyricism, subsiding in a quiet midsection, and returning to the opening affect.
For Judith Shatin’s Grito, ostensibly inspired by a Goya painting and accompanied by projected abstract images, rare degree and TMI joined forces to create something like Morton Feldman with dynamics. Finally, the Riley took us back to the heady days of happenings, black strobe lights, tie-dyed clothes and nascent minimalism among all the other “isms.”
As with TMI, the players of rare degree were in admirable form and presented the materials, as best we can tell never having heard them before, with conviction and authenticity. [Click title for full review.]
January 6, 2010
Future of Classical Music Broadcasting in Boston in Jeopardy
More than 400 classical music aficionados filled the New Old South Church Tuesday night, January 5, to voice their concerns over elimination of classical music programming at WGBH Radio. On December 1, WGBH shifted all its concert music broadcasts to station WCRB, where it has established a 24-hour all-classical format and promptly announced the cancellation of Friday BSO broadcasts. [Click title for complete article]
December 24, 2009
Anything We Can Do for Classical Music Radio in Boston?
Boston Musical Intelligencer will be presenting a panel discussion at Old South Church, Copley Square, Tuesday, January 5, 6:00 to 7:30 pm. The panel intends to address the overwhelming response of dismay at the diminution of classical music programming in the greater Boston area.
Moderator: William M. Bulger, former MA Senate President and President, University of Massachusetts, board member of the Boston Public Library and BSO
Panelists: Richard Dyer, former classical music critic, The Boston Globe; Christopher Lydon, Radio Talk Host; Dave MacNeill, for many decades announcer, then general manager at the old WCRB; and John Voci, general manager, WGBH
Respondents from BMInt: Mark DeVoto, John W. Ehrlich, Brian Jones, Peter Van Zandt Lane, Tom Schnauber, David Patterson, Rebecca Marchand.
The event is free and open to the public. Click here for a printable flyer. Click title to read comments.
November 11, 2009
Fine Vocalizations, Some Mediocre Works with Chameleon
Chameleon Arts Ensemble presented their second program of the season, tagged “wordless wondrous things,” at the Goethe-Institut on Saturday evening, November 7. The unifying component of the works performed was that each of the instrumental pieces was, in some way, vocally conceived.
Sebastien Currier’s Whispers was by far a more intriguing work and without doubt the most engaging performance of the evening. The piece, scored for flute, cello, piano, and percussion, constantly toyed with the instrumental expression of typically non-musical vocal sounds.
Chameleon Arts Ensemble delivered performances of the highest caliber, though the final effect of the concert was that of great performers weighed down by mediocre works. [Click title for full review.]