A two-person chamber opera by a South Florida-based composer had an impact beyond its intimate scale thanks to two powerhouse performances and a beautifully accomplished suite of computer projections. Fairy Tales: Songs of the Dandelion Woman, which had its premiere in early May at the SoBe Institute for the Arts in Miami Beach (and which I saw May 17), is the brainchild of … [Read more...]
FGO’s beautifully sung ‘Thaïs’ could use a little more heat
The operas of Jules Massenet are not as admired today as they once were in the last 20 years of the 19th century, when works such as Manon, Werther, Sapho and many others made the industrious French composer a wealthy and famous man. He has been much abused by history for his willingness to cater to the mass taste of his day and making no absolutely bones about it. “I don’t … [Read more...]
Cellist to walk Camino de Santiago on pilgrimage for Bach
One of Dane Johansen’s paternal ancestors helped oversee the transition of Alaska from czarist Russia to the United States in the late 19th century, and having grown up in Fairbanks as a sixth-generation resident of the Last Frontier, Johansen has been looking for a way to marry his love and knowledge of the outdoors with his career as a cellist. He appears to have found it: … [Read more...]
No-holds-barred Mahler 7th ends NWS season in blaze of glory
Gustav Mahler is a composer whose vast constructs encourage interpretations that allow space for Mystery to inhabit some of his symphonies’ many rooms. For Michael Tilson Thomas, the surface perplexities of Mahler’s Seventh can be likened to the jump-cut film styles of the German expressionist filmmakers Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau, who would follow Mahler in the cultural space … [Read more...]
Soprano adds extra luster to fine Master Chorale outing
The progress that the Master Chorale of South Florida made in its first concert of the current season was gratifyingly on display again Saturday night for its second and last concert of the season, this one devoted to music by child prodigies. New artistic director Brett Karlin chose three very eminent prodigies (rather than say, William Crotch or Camille Saint-Saëns) for the … [Read more...]
Strong singing stands out at fine FGO ‘Tosca’
Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca is, with the exception of the one-act Il Tabarro, the most veristic of the Italian composer’s works, and it needs a lot of good red blood to make it work. I don’t mean literal blood, of course, though there could have been some in several spots in the opera Saturday night at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, but the figurative kind: A … [Read more...]
Manasse, Schwarz bring standout Mozart to Symphonia
It’s always a good day at a concert when you can hear something new in a pillar of the repertoire like Mozart. And so it was Sunday afternoon at the Roberts Theater for the season-closing concert by The Symphonia Boca Raton (though they’ll appear later this month as the orchestra for the Master Chorale of South Florida), which brought the eminent conductor Gerard Schwarz to … [Read more...]
Zwilich concerto a crowd-pleaser at SoFla Symphony
The Miami-born composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, first woman to earn a Pulitzer Prize for music and the first woman to earn a composition doctorate at Juilliard, remains busily composing in her 70s. The part-time Pompano Beach resident’s piano concerto Shadows, which premiered in 2011, had its first Florida performances this past week on the programs of the South Florida … [Read more...]
Mahler’s Second at Lynn makes powerful impact
Something of a musical milestone took place the other day at Lynn University when the school’s conservatory orchestra, accompanied by two soloists and the Master Chorale of South Florida, gave two performances of Gustav Mahler’s gigantic Resurrection Symphony (No. 2 in C minor). These performances had actually been planned for the 2012-13 season, but Lynn’s hosting of one of … [Read more...]
PB Opera wraps season with well-sung, entertaining ‘Hoffmann’
Opera’s long history means that today’s audiences are treated to entertainment conventions from several different eras, and when it gets into pre-Industrial Revolution territory, viewers generally have to make something of a leap to get to full enjoyment. But Les Contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann) was composed by Jacques Offenbach for a late 19th-century urban … [Read more...]