Music
1939 results
Page 100
Emerson Quartet at the Perelman
Ambitious and uncompromising
The Emerson Quartet, with its fine new cellist, Paul Watkins, opened the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society’s season with an ambitious program, excellently performed.
Articles
7 minute read
Donizetti’s ‘Elixir of Love’ in Wilmington
An old-fashioned Elixir
Some directors distort Donizetti’s Elixir of Love. OperaDelaware’s decidedly old-fashioned approach was like a refreshing splash of water.
Articles
3 minute read
One week, three concerts
If Mozart and Beethoven were here today….
Last week, I attended three concerts that offered a glimpse of the range of emotional, aesthetic and intellectual experiences that music offers to those of us who attend concerts as frequently as other people attend plays and movies.
Articles
6 minute read
Orchestra plays Shostakovich (1st review)
Fifty years of horror
If the Shostakovich Eleventh is performed with the right sensitivity and conviction, it’s no mere evocation of tragic events, but a lament for the human tragedy itself. Guest conductor Semyon Bychkov’s performance emphasized the tapestry-like elements of the score at the expense of some of the drama.
Articles
7 minute read
A composer’s secrets
Secrets of a great composer (who hasn't yet mastered the elevator speech)
When I recently dug out an anthem I’d written 32 years ago, I was struck by how good it was— and how bad it was, too. How could I salvage it? Just another day in the life of a composer.
Articles
6 minute read
Met’s misguided new ‘Eugene Onegin’
If it ain't broke....
The Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Eugene Onegin is full of innovations, almost all of them detrimental.
Articles
4 minute read
Orchestra plays Britten, Strauss and Mahler
Clothes make the music man
Oboist Richard Woodhams took the stage in a tailored blue shirt, worn outside his pants— It symbolizes a change in attitude— a signal that the Philadelphia Orchestra understands its need to experiment and adapt.
Articles
4 minute read
Yannick leads Beethoven’s Ninth (2nd review)
Yannick leaps off a musical cliff
Yannick Nézet-Séguin is emerging as an artist of notable imagination and daring. In the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth he was maybe a little too daring.
Articles
3 minute read
Yannick leads Beethoven’s Ninth (1st review)
In the quest for goose bumps, size matters
Yannick-Nézet Séguin’s version of Beethoven’s Ninth inadvertently demonstrated that the same work can be performed in radically different ways. He made the most of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s major asset: Its size.
Articles
4 minute read
Opera Philadelphia’s ‘Nabucco’ (2nd review)
The mightiest man on Earth? (and other flaws in Verdi’s Nabucco)
Nabucco’s characters lack depth, and the music is less accomplished than what Verdi would write just a few years later. So director/designer Thaddeus Strassberger was indeed clever to mount this Nabucco as it might have been performed in Italy in the 1840s.
Articles
4 minute read