a virtual journal and blog of the classical music scene in Boston
Robert Levin, editor; Bettina A. Norton, executive editor; Lee Eiseman, publisher
Reviews
August 31, 2010
BCMS Dispatches Three Classics to End Summer Season
by Lee Eiseman
A near-capacity audience at the Boston Chamber Music Society’s concert at Watertown’s Mosesian Theater on August 28 featured Artistic Director Emeritus and cellist Ronald Thomas with pianist Reiko Aizawa and violinist Steven Copes.
Thomas’s bow arm produced plenty of power in Chopin’s Introduction and Polonaise Brilliant, but pianist Aizawa needs to bump up the decibels as a chamber music partner. In Beethoven’s Sonata for Piano and Violin with violinist Steven Copes, Aizawa again seemed overly deferential.
After a somewhat tentative first movement of Schumann’s Piano Trio in F major op. 80, Thomas got a different bow, complaining that the first bow had even less hair than he did. The three remaining movements were played with great generosity and excitement. [Click title for full review.]
August 29, 2010
World-class Pianist Joel Fan plus Unimaginative Hagen Première
by Leslie Gerber
Pianist Joel Fan, playing Saturday evening, August 28, at Maverick Concerts, gave impressive, powerful performances of Chopin’s “Funeral March” Sonata and Barber’s Piano Sonata. Fan has tremendous technique and a vivid musical imagination that brought these pieces to life. He also did yeoman work as the left hand soloist in a new chamber orchestra version of Daron Hagen’s 2001 Seven Last Words, ably conducted by Maverick’s Music Director Alexander Platt. The piece itself, however, disappointed with its emphasis of surface attractions over real substance, seeming to reinforce impressions rather than produce them. [Click title for full review.]
August 27, 2010
Mälkki, with Bell, and Denk, Raises Questions of Tempo and Gender
by Eli Newberger
Both Felix Mendelssohn’s Concerto in D minor for violin, piano, and strings and his Overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” were given dashing interpretations by conductor Susanna Mälkki—the former with violinist Joshua Bell, and pianist Jeremy Denk in the Tanglewood Shed on August 21. Beethoven’s Romance No. 2 in F major for violin and orchestra, with Bell, and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4 in B-flat, Op. 60, offered striking contrasts.
Mälkki expresses ideas and emotions with her fingers, hands, face, hair, torso, and legs.
Wild tempos in the hands of virtuoso players can stir excitement in the absence of great musical substance, and frustration can come when a great orchestra, accustomed to male conductors, faces a woman on its podium. [Click title for full review.]
August 26, 2010
By and Large Enjoyable Glimmerglass Season
by David Shengold
This 2010 season at Glimmerglass, the fifth and last of Michael MacLeod’s regime, was by and large an enjoyable one. Credit is due to former Director of Casting and Artistic Operations Donald Marrazzo and Donald Eastman, who designed a reasonably attractive set flexible enough to suit four very different works.
The North American professional stage première of Handel’s Tolomeo was undermined by Chas Rader-Shieber’s annoying, derivative, grotesquely supernumerary-marred staging. Musically however, things went swimmingly.
Tender Land, Aaron Copland’s only full-length opera, was an inspired choice for a production utilizing only Young Artists. It was quite a moving evening, thanks to wonderful, unaffected portrayals of the leading character (Laurie Moss, a farm girl) and her mother by Lindsay Russell and Stephanie Foley Davis.
Music Director David Angus did better with an effervescent Nozze di Figaro than with the next day’s decent but hardly “festival” Tosca, though the reduced orchestra played capably enough save for the string colloquy underlying the Cavaradossi/Jailor exchange. Leon Major’s Nozze di Figaro was transposed, seemingly to an Edwardian Britain, but the opera worked, due to a fine cast and inventive, well-timed blocking; my main objection was to the omnipresence onstage of Basilio, who witnessed virtually everything, to no evident gain. One wondered why MacLeod had chosen to mount Tosca in the first place. [Click title for full review.]
August 24, 2010
Upshaw, Morlot Weave Affecting Textures with BSO
by Eli Newberger
Mozart’s 250-year-old Symphony No. 31 in D was brought to contemporary relevance by a sympathetic conductor, Ludovic Morlot, leading the splendid Boston Symphony Orchestra on August 20 at Tanglewood. Morlot’s “Mother Goose Suite” focused on the kaleidoscopic qualities of Ravel’s orchestration.
World-class soprano Dawn Upshaw’s modest stage manner belied her powerful emotionality and vocal virtuosity, bringing tears to the eyes and cheers to the heart in her knowing evocations of love and loss and the charming intimacies of country life in two moving works, Joseph Canteloube’s Songs of the Auvergne, and Osvaldo Golijov’s Three Songs for Soprano and Orchestra. If there were a perfect singer for the huge emotional range in these works, it was Upshaw. [Click title for full review.]
August 23, 2010
Generous, Too Lovely, Mixed Blessings at Maverick
by Leslie Gerber
Pianist Fred Hersch, playing a solo jazz recital at Maverick Concerts Saturday evening, displayed beautiful tone and confident technique that would be the envy of many classical pianists. His romantic approach to a variety of jazz and popular tunes, as well as his own originals, eventually sounded like too much of the same thing to one listener, but it was consistent and effective on its own terms. The Ebène Quartet, Sunday afternoon, played works of Mozart and Debussy with exaggerations and mannerisms that called attention to themselves and away from the music. But the same kind of emphatic playing proved very appropriate in a memorable performance of Beethoven’s Quartet, Op. 131. [Click title for full review.]
Voyage of Discovery Finds Less-Known Early-20th-Century American Works
by Lee Eiseman
On August 21, a decommissioned barn at Newburyport’s Maudsley Center for the Arts was the venue for American Century Music. Samuel Barber’s String Quartet, op. 11 got a stirring reading, thanks to the dramatic leadership of first violinist Diaz.
While the ensemble could not always provide the dramatic accents of an established group, their playing did show estimable investment in Piston’s difficult Quintet for Flute and Strings. Foote’s Nocturne and Scherzo for Flute and String Quartet and Gershwin’s Lullaby for String Quartet were followed by a broad and brio performance of Ives’s String Quartet no. 1 “A Revival Service,” a veritable plum pudding of hymns that deserved and received a grateful Amen. [Click title for full review.]
Pearson Headlines in Loeffler, Unfamiliar Mozart and Prokofiev
by Vance R. Koven
The closing concert of this summer’s Portland Chamber Music Festival on August 21 at the University of Southern Maine saw oboist Peggy Pearson in unfamiliar works, though two composers, Mozart and Prokofiev, are household names.
Pearson’s transcription works extremely well and drives home how much substance Mozart has packed into this ostensible trifle, Divertimento in D, K. 136, originally for string quartet. We discovered much greater formal coherence on this hearing of the Loeffler Two Rhapsodies, with Pearson,violist Jessica Thompson, and pianist Dena Levine. The Prokofiev Quintet in G minor is not his most original writing but holds its own with the ‘20s fashion, playful and clever. [Click title for full review.]
August 20, 2010
Portland’s Competition Winner Between Familiar, Neglected Quintets
by Vance R. Koven
The Portland Chamber Music Festival concert on August 19 featured one familiar and two unfamiliar works — of the latter, one because it is new and the other because it is neglected. The ensemble in the Mozart Clarinet Quintet in A produced rich, sweet sounds, caressing all the notes and achieving admirable sonic blending. Our only reservation had to do with a certain reticence in the strings. We have nothing but commendation for the performance of the Dohnányi Piano Quintet in C minor, op. 1. Andrew List’s Six Bagatelles for String Trio, six little pieces with maximum contrast ranging from “in your face” to “other-worldly,” earned well-deserved applause. [Click title for full review.]
The Joint wuz Jumpin’ with Thibaudet, Spano, Martin
by Eli Newberger
The spirits of “Duke” Ellington, “Count” Basie, “Fats” Waller, and Art Tatum hovered gently over a splendidly satisfying concert in the Tanglewood Shed on August 15. Jazz from the 1920s and 1930s inspired both the afternoon’s composers and Maestro Robert Spano, a fine choice to lead the BSO through the many delights and sensibilities of this quintessentially American music, beginning and ending with the greatest synthesizer of jazz and classics, George Gershwin (An American in Paris and Piano Concerto in F with Jean-Yves Thibaudet, soloist). The other offerings were by the redoubtable composer and jazz scholar Gunther Schuller (Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee) and long-time Tanglewood faculty member Leonard Bernstein (Prelude Fugue and Riffs, with the BSO’s Thomas Martin, soloist.) [Click title for full review.]