South Florida has been a good place for the Mexican soprano Maria Alejandres. She has sung Lucia for Palm Beach Opera, Manuel de Falla for the Palm Beach Symphony, and Juliette for Florida Grand Opera, and Saturday night she returned to FGO as the best-loved of Giuseppe Verdi’s heroines, Violetta Valery, the doomed courtesan of La Traviata. She was joined by a very fine … [Read more...]
Strong Britten should be the start of something important for PBO
It is not too much to say that Palm Beach Opera inaugurated a new and exciting era for itself this week with its two presentations of Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw. And as it happens, it was quite a good production, with strong singing, smart staging and good orchestral playing of a very challenging score, and the company can justly be proud of it. But the most … [Read more...]
Seraphic Fire, Renaissance jam band bring Ponce de Leon’s era alive
It takes a leap of empathy and a sizable amount of scholarship to take an audience back five centuries to a time too remote from our own to be entirely understandable, yet recognizably humanist in a way that we still emulate. That Seraphic Fire was able to do this with its program of late medieval and early Renaissance music from Spain – in honor of Juan Ponce de León’s … [Read more...]
Young Artists take PBO stage for Britten’s ‘Turn of the Screw’
Opera has a great bounty of composer anniversaries this year, with the 200th birthdays of Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner, and the 100th anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Britten. Britten had what would today be considered a relatively short life, dying at age 63 in 1976 after several years of heart disease-related decline, perhaps exacerbated by a bout of syphilis. He … [Read more...]
Conrad Tao: Bringing back the composer-performer
It’s easy to forget, when talking to him about his String Quartet No. 2, his global career, the new-music festival he’s organizing this summer in Brooklyn or his incisive thoughts on contemporary concert culture, that Conrad Tao is only 18 years old. But then again, he’s been a musician for virtually all of his short life. He was just 18 months old when his parents discovered … [Read more...]
At the symphony II: Tenor joins returning performers for PB Symphony gala
For its gala fundraiser Thursday night at the Mar-a-Lago Club, the Palm Beach Symphony brought back two of its guest stars from last year, the Russian-American pianist Lola Astanova and conductor Jajha Ling of the San Diego Symphony. The orchestra also introduced to area audiences a fresh talent, Brazilian tenor Thiago Arancam, who sang a selection of arias and songs from the … [Read more...]
At the symphony I: Lovely Mozart at Boca Symphonia
Philippe Entremont closed out his tenure as director of the Boca Raton Symphonia on March 24 with a concert that included a flute concerto by Mozart and works by Respighi and Shchedrin. The French pianist and conductor will return for one concert next season, but conducting duties will be divided among three other maestros: Gerard Schwarz, Alexander Platt and James Judd. … [Read more...]
Aggressive Vivaldi, joyful Bach at Firebird Chamber
Over the course of its 11 years, the Seraphic Fire organization has returned several times to the music of J.S. Bach: The Mass in B minor, the St. John Passion, the six Motets, the Brandenburg Concertos. Although the subject of its spinoff chamber group’s most recent concert is nominally Vivaldi, one of the Bach cantatas, Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen (BWV 51), plays just as … [Read more...]
Radiant ‘Neruda Songs,’ zesty Beethoven Ninth close Cleveland residency
The five songs for mezzo-soprano and orchestra that Peter Lieberson composed in 2004 to the poems of Pablo Neruda have taken on something of a sacred aura since the death of Lieberson’s wife, Lorraine, in 2005. With Lieberson’s own death in 2011, also from cancer, the Neruda Songs wear a cloak of tragedy once you know their back story, much as Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder … [Read more...]
PB Opera gives us a ‘Salome’ with a conscience
Richard Strauss’ Salome has earned its reputation for decadence not just because of its Oscar Wilde source, the time of its composition in the overripe-civilization years of the early 20th century, or its score, with its strange, unexpected sounds at every turn. It has also earned it because of the story itself, which ends in a parody of Wagnerian bliss, with a cruel but … [Read more...]