The world of dance is famously tough on physiques, not just in the sheer wear and tear on bones and ligaments incurred by practitioners of this most athletic of the arts, but perhaps even more so in psychological ways. The pressure to be thin and to be in top physical shape is rarely relenting, and a new work of dance that tackles this idea head-on had its premiere Sunday … [Read more...]
New music, Baroque concerto best fits for Milanese ensemble
A small string orchestra is well-suited for music of the Baroque, and indeed, there have been a number of such groups, full of young, eager players, founded in the past decade or so. Such a one is I Musici Estensi, established in Milan in 2004, and it’s known not just for its Baroque performances, but music of many other eras. Saturday night, the group was joined at the Crest … [Read more...]
Exuberant Dohnanyi wraps chamber fest’s 22nd summer
A work of teenage exuberance was served up with high spirits and full-on late Romanticism on Sunday as the 22nd season of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival’s summer season came to a close at Delray Beach’s Crest Theatre. The very first published opus of Ernst von Dohnányi (or Ernö Dohnányi, to give him his Hungarian name), a powerful Brahmsian piano quintet, occupied the … [Read more...]
Quintets hit high points in PB Chamber Fest’s Week 3
For all the different varieties of chamber music there can be, strings tend to be heard more often in quartets and winds in quintets. The 22nd edition of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival has no string quartets on its programs this summer, but it came close Sunday at Delray Beach’s Crest Theatre, closing with a string quintet, and opening with two wind quintet miniatures. … [Read more...]
A compelling American quintet in chamber fest’s Week 2
It is one of the great mysteries of American musical life: Why, in a country that has produced so many fine classical composers, does the average person know nothing of their music? There are any number of reasons that are usually trotted out to explain this phenomenon, from the overwhelming dominance of American popular music worldwide to the lack of arts education in the … [Read more...]
Rustic Brahms and engaging American Romanticism in chamber fest’s Week 1
Johannes Brahms had a healthy respect for the music of the past, and probably would have made a formidable professional musicologist had he chosen to go that route. Even in his earlier works there is an engagement with older forms that would bear fruit throughout his compositional career, until his very last work, a series of 11 austerely beautiful organ chorale preludes based … [Read more...]
New Miami chamber music group makes an important debut
It could be that the audience at the University of Miami’s Gusman Hall on Sunday afternoon was witness to the birth of a musical organization that will take South Florida into the kind of direction only the New World Symphony has gone heretofore. And it may be too early to tell. But the event, ostensibly the closing day of the 20th Mainly Mozart Festival, inaugurated a concert … [Read more...]
Chameleon ends season with worthy revival of forgotten composer
It’s surely the case that most of the readers of this review have never heard of the Swedish woman composer Elfrida Andrée (1841-1929), whose career ran into the standard gender roadblocks of the Victorian era into which she was born. But Andrée’s music is well worth hearing, and last Sunday (May 12), the Chameleon Musicians chamber music series in Fort Lauderdale closed its … [Read more...]
Seraphic Fire ends 11th season in standout style
Seraphic Fire wrapped its 11th season this past week with a new record release, a $12,500 NEA grant in hand to record the next one, and a concert of widely varied works that illustrated the range of its interests as well as the flexibility of its singers. Dubbed Cathedral Classics, the potpourri concert featured 18 short works, many of them suggested by an email campaign in … [Read more...]
Good Dvorak, Beethoven end Boca Symphonia season
The Boca Raton Symphonia closed its 2012-13 season Sunday with a too-little-heard major concerto and a genial reading of a major symphony, securing a solid planetary foothold amid the constellation of local chamber orchestras that appeared in the wake of the Florida Philharmonic’s Big Bang. Let by guest conductor Constantine Kitsopoulos, who directed the group last month at … [Read more...]