Lyric Fest's Vienna: City of Song

Art song in the age of the living room

Lyric Fest recreated the homey atmosphere in which the great art songs of the 18th and 19th centuries were performed in their season-opening program, Vienna, City of Song.

Susan Gould

Oct 13, 2014 · Articles · 4 minute read

Contemporary Philadelphia composers

A school for the unschooled

Seven Philadelphia composers demonstrate that you can have a movement without stifling individuality.

Tom Purdom

Oct 11, 2014 · Articles · 4 minute read

Michael Brown Protest at the St. Louis Symphony

The sanctity of the concert hall?

Some were alienated by the Michael Brown protest at a St. Louis Symphony concert, although some (a minority) applauded. As for “terrorism,” what a luxury it is to live in America, as opposed to, say, Iraq, where one can apply that label to what took place in St. Louis and mean it.

Maria Thompson Corley

Oct 11, 2014 · Articles · 5 minute read

Mennonite singing

Make a joyful noise unto the Lord

You haven’t lived until you’ve heard 200 farmers sing chorales unaccompanied.

Michael Lawrence

Oct 07, 2014 · Articles · 2 minute read

Bobby Rydell at Marple Newtown Performing Arts Center

More than just an aging teen idol

Longtime Philadelphia-area resident Bobby Rydell’s career has been going strong for more than half of a century.

Robert J. Robbins

Oct 07, 2014 · Articles · 3 minute read

Chucho Valdés at the Annenberg Center

One artist's brain, heart, and hands

Chucho Valdés provides a meditation on the piano qua piano in a solo performance by a master of Cuban jazz.

Judy Weightman

Oct 05, 2014 · Articles · 3 minute read

Opera Philadelphia’s updated ‘Barber of Seville’

The barber gets clipped

Rossini’s Barber of Seville presupposes a society where women are repressed. Someone forgot to tell the producers of this misconceived 20th-century update.

Steve Cohen

Oct 03, 2014 · Articles · 4 minute read

Astral Artists: Old World/New World

From klezmer to the cosmic

Astral Artists presents a concert that’s as American as pizza, with a tour de force for the clarinetist on their roster of promising young musicians.

Tom Purdom

Sep 30, 2014 · Articles · 4 minute read

Philadelphia Orchestra’s season begins (second review)

Mountain views and a stormy Mozart

Each time he mounts a large-scale composition, our beloved Yannick shows his mastery of the expanded orchestral forces involved. If only Lang Lang exerted such (self) control.

Victor L. Schermer

Sep 30, 2014 · Articles · 4 minute read

Philadelphia Orchestra’s season begins (first review)

The grand and the grandiose

The Philadelphia Orchestra’s season opener featured Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17 with a willful Lang Lang doing everything at the keyboard except playing the music, and Richard Strauss’s sprawling Alpine Symphony, which showed the Orchestra to much happier effect.

Robert Zaller

Sep 29, 2014 · Articles · 5 minute read