Music
1950 results
Page 89
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.
Articles
5 minute read
Barbra Streisand, Tony Bennett, Lady Gaga
Tony and Barbra get a gimmick
Some popular singers cover the standards; others do unexpected partnerings. These albums, by two of the best singers in the last half century — Barbra Streisand and Tony Bennett — do both.
Articles
5 minute read
The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia with pianist Di Wu
Youthful stars and might-have-beens
The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia opens its season with a program that sticks to a conventional format but varies it with two novelties.
Articles
3 minute read
Choral Arts Philadelphia sings Rachmaninoff's 'All Night Vigil'
On the road with Choral Arts
Most of the singers in Choral Arts Philadelphia are unpaid volunteers, but they attack their job like pros.
Articles
5 minute read
The 2014 Glimmerglass Opera Festival, part two
A new take on ‘Madame Butterfly’
Francesca Zambello may well be a model for opera directors in the 21st century. Her direction of Madame Butterfly hints at some of the reasons why.
Articles
5 minute read
'Star Trek' and my own 'Enigma Variations'
Dreams of music
I never dream of music. I’ve heard composers talk of it, and I’ve envied that gift. Because it is a gift if a composition can indeed come to you just like that, like a scene in a movie, in a dream. What I wouldn’t give to have that! But I don’t.
Articles
5 minute read
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The 2014 Glimmerglass Opera Festival
Deserted, abused, drowned, abandoned
In the summer, you have to leave Philly to enjoy opera. The Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, New York is a worthwhile destination.
Articles
6 minute read
I was the mother of a teenaged garage band
Ever since Noah was small, I’ve taught him that rock and roll is more than music; it is, as Bruce insinuates, a religion.
Articles
4 minute read
Perseverance Jazz Band in Wallingford
Where did New Orleans jazz go? To Philly!
Traditional New Orleans jazz survives and flourishes some 1,300 miles to the northeast of its birthplace with the Perseverance Jazz Band.
Articles
4 minute read
Covent Garden’s ‘Manon Lescaut’
Tawdry as she goes
Covent Garden’s controversial porno-revival of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut was denounced as tawdry and coarse. Yet it did grip my attention. And it does support the opera’s key emotional point.
Articles
4 minute read