a virtual journal and blog of the classical music scene in Boston
Robert Levin, editor; Bettina A. Norton, executive editor; Lee Eiseman, publisher
News & Features
July 5, 2011
NEC Shows America’s Musical Prowess in Mahler Country
by Christopher Hailey
In tribute to the centennial of Gustav Mahler’s death, the NEC Youth Philharmonic under Benjamin Zander has recently performed in a highly successful tour of Eastern Europe from June 14 — 24 that featured concerts in Vienna at the Musikverein and in Prague at Dvorák Hall in the Rudolfinum — both cities at that figured [...]
June 30, 2011
Triple Play
by BMINT STAFF
Narek Hakhnazaryan, who completed New England Conservatory’s Artist Diploma program last month as a student of Laurence Lesser, has received the coveted €20,000 Gold Medal Award in cello at the XIV International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. Hakhnazaryan also received the Audience Prize. In addition, at the conclusion of the second round of competition last week, he was honored by the jury for “Best chamber concerto performance.” He will perform in a Winners’ Gala Concert with an orchestra conducted by Valery Gergiev in Moscow on July 1. His many performances in Boston during his NEC days include one which garnered a rave review from BMInt here. Bravo, Narek, and Congratulations!
June 29, 2011
Monadnock Music Takes a Village to Make a Festival
by Bettina A. Norton
Four founders and long-standing leaders of New England music organizations have been replaced by new faces within the past year or so. Three legends — Craig Smith, founder of Emmanuel Music, Charles Ansbacher, founder of Boston Landmarks Orchestra, and Mark P. Malkovich, III, founder of the Newport Music Festival, all died recently. The fourth legend, [...]
June 24, 2011
WCRB’s Extensive Live Tanglewood Coverage
by BMINT STAFF
This summer WCRB will not only be broadcasting every BSO Tanglewood concert live but will also be expanding their coverage to include many of the performances at Seiji Ozawa Hall. According to Ben Roe, manager of classical services for WGBH, “From Ozawa’s debut to Bernstein’s farewell, musical memories are made every summer – and indeed, [...]
June 18, 2011
Creating the Admirable Scene for BEMF’s Niobe
by Bettina A. Norton
It takes a genius to make a stage less than forty feet deep — including stage extension — convey an Arcadian countryside. Stage Director Gilbert Blin, affiliated with the Boston Early Music Festival since 2001, achieved this illusion by employing his knowledge of European art history with experience in the theater for the current BEMF [...]
Sick Puppy’s Free Music Feast
by Peter Van Zandt Lane
New England Conservatory’s Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP, aka Sick Puppy) has established itself as one of the most prolific contemporary music festivals the East Coast has to offer. Running from June 18-25, the festival offers a multifaceted program for composers, instrumentalists, and vocalists through participant ensembles, master classes, and workshops in electronic music [...]
June 11, 2011
Why Schubert & the Piano at BEMF….?
by Christopher Greenleaf
Christopher Greenleaf, with Sylvia Berry, Clara Rottsolk, and Stephen Porter, are the main participants in “Schubert & the (forte)piano, the performer’s perspective.” The symposium and two concerts, a BEMF Fringe Event, will be held from 9 am to noon on Thursday morning, June 16, at First Lutheran Church, Boston. The following is excerpted from the [...]
June 7, 2011
Guitar to be Celebrated in Five-Day Festival
by Rebecca Marchand
The month of June is host to multiple wonderful music festivals here in Boston. Recently, world-renowned guitarist Eliot Fisk discussed his brainchild and increasingly successful Boston Guitarfest, now in its sixth year, which runs from June 15-19. This year’s theme is “Bell’ Italia,” largely in celebration of master guitarist Oscar Ghiglia, with whom Fisk studied [...]
June 2, 2011
WCRB to Cover RI Area
by Lee Eiseman
WGBH has announced today that beginning in August it will extend the broadcast coverage of its classical music arm, WCRB, through a re-transmission arrangement with WJMF FM 88.7 in Somerset, RI, a service of Bryant University. According to Ben Roe, WGBH/WCRB’s director of classical services, this will allow Providence and its environs, currently one of [...]
June 1, 2011
BEMF’s style, creativity, fringe benefits
by Zoe Kemmerling
Browsing the Boston Early Music Festival’s 2011 schedule of events brings to mind the intrepid musicological travels of eighteenth-century musician and writer Charles Burney and his eager mission to amass, through personal experience, nothing less than the entire history of Western musical practice to date —with a stylish and witty brand of scholarly insight to [...]
May 26, 2011
Tanglewood’s Third Try: Levine Replacements Announced
by Michael Miller
This article begins the second series of dispatches from an estimable sibling e-journal, The Berkshire Review. From time to time this summer, their writers will be covering events in the western parts of Massachusetts and nearby New York for BMInt. In the regular concert season, Berkshire Review will selectively reprint some posts from our journal. This [...]
May 21, 2011
Whither Classical Radio Boston Now?
by Lee Eiseman
BMInt welcomed WGBH/WCRB’s Benjamin Roe, new manager of classical services, to Boston in an article from last February here. Now that he has been at the helm long enough to get his bearings and begin to impose his own destination on programming, he’s ready to talk to us about the station’s new weekend programming. One [...]
May 13, 2011
Rockport Revisited
by David Griesinger
Ed: The Rockport Chamber Music Festival in Rockport, MA, is set to open its second season in its sumptuous Shalin Liu Performance Center on June 9, and concerts will run through July 17. In honor of the first anniversary of the dedication of Rockport Music’s new home, BMInt is pleased to publish a very interesting [...]
May 6, 2011
Six New Names in BSO Conductor Roster
by BMINT STAFF
With the announcement of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 2011-2012 season, discussed below in the accompanying article by Mark DeVoto, came the announcement of conductors for the season (and the unsurprising revelation that James Levine would not be conducting at Tanglewood this summer) . Knowing that all eyes are on who is invited and who might [...]
Excellent Choices and Surprises: BSO 2011-2012
by Mark DeVoto
I write from Cambridge, that other Cambridge, in the U.K., where I’m visiting my just-married daughter and her husband. The program listing for the Boston Symphony for the 2011-2012 season has just arrived and I’ve looked it over carefully, remembering my chants of praise and rants of condemnation in these pages last month when I [...]
April 28, 2011
Opera’s Due Date, Delivery in Boston
by Bettina A. Norton
Boston has hosted many conferences in the last quarter century — for medicine, bio-science, finance, life sciences, education, basically, according to the office of Mass Convention Center Authority, for those “that support core industries of Massachusetts.” Attendees may range from 50 to 26,000. (The Penny Arcade Expo logged over 60,000 in three days.) Although it [...]
April 24, 2011
Benjamin Zander on Two Sides of the Russian Soul
by Lee Eiseman
For thirty-two years Benjamin Zander has been guiding musicians of the Boston Philharmonic and their audiences in intense journeys through the greatest orchestral literature, often with famous soloists. On April 30, May 1 and May 2, the “legendary” cellist, Natalia Gutman returns for the third time. The all-Russian program with Shostakovich’s introspective Second Cello Concerto [...]
April 21, 2011
Macedonia Marvel, Simon Trpceski, Pianist with BSO
by Bettina A. Norton
The Macedonian pianist Simon Trpceski will make his debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the Liszt Piano Concerto No. 2 in a concert conducted by Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos on April 28, 29, and 30. This interview was conducted by telephone from Boston to Macedonia on Wednesday morning, April 13. Besides his obvious enthusiasm for [...]
April 19, 2011
BU Offers Gounod’s Other Opera, Roméo et Juliette
by BMINT STAFF
The first performance of Gounod’s, at the Théâtre-Lyrique Impérial du Châtelet in Paris in 1867, was 154 years ago, almost to the day of four upcoming performances at Boston University. It is not often heard. Kobbé recounts, in the first American edition of his “Definitive” Opera Book, that the opera has always been more popular [...]
April 11, 2011
Singing for Others’ Suppers: Japan Benefit
by BMINT STAFF
Yui Anzai, a member of The Boston Cecilia who has spearheaded an upcoming benefit concert for Japan, was born in Japan’s Fukushima prefecture, site of the recent earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster. Her father’s work brought the family to New Jersey when she was eleven. When a chorus club was founded in her elementary school, [...]
April 2, 2011
Upcoming Gunther Schuller Tribute
by Bettina A. Norton
Not only is there to be a concert of poems set to music in honor of the eighty-fifth birthday of Gunther Schuller this coming Tuesday, but also the octogenarian composer, a Boston institution, is to be one of the panelists on a pre-concert discussion moderated by Phoenix classical music critic, Lloyd Schwartz. He will keep [...]
March 27, 2011
A War on Warhorses Even More Suggestions
by Mark DeVoto
Ed. Note: Mark DeVoto has added even more of his thoughts on BSO repertoire. His suggested season continues below the break. Click “continued” and scroll down for the concerts eleven through fifteen. To be the successful director of a major orchestra one has to earn and preserve respect — from the orchestra players first and [...]
Notions of Contemporary Music and Authenticity
by David Dominique
Part II of an interview with Joshua Fineberg In anticipation of Sound Icon’s landmark concert this past Saturday, March 26, I interviewed Joshua Fineberg, a leading expert on spectral music and Associate Professor of Composition at Boston University. In Part II, we discuss the splintered state of contemporary music, the “glory days” of the past, [...]
March 25, 2011
Black-Belt Ariel and Macedonian Marvel
by BMINT STAFF
The Boston Symphony Orchestra can hardly be accused of sticking with “same old same old” in the coming concerts, featuring two artists new to its roster and hardly known to the general music-going public. One is a Tae Kwon Do black-belt soprano in the role of Ariel for Thomas Adès’s The Tempest, the other a [...]
March 24, 2011
The Naked Emperor and Authentic Performance
by Mark Kroll
Early music has been in the news a lot this month, and that is a good thing. For example, the recent concert of the Handel and Haydn Society led by Richard Egarr received no less than three Boston reviews, two in this journal (Joseph E. Morgan, March 20, and Tamar Hestrin Grader, March 21) and [...]