By Robert Croan Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, seen in Broward Center’s Au-Rene Theater on Friday night, was a tribute to Florida Grand Opera’s excellent Young Artists Studio. Recent alumni took on three of the four leading roles, with all supporting characters assigned to current members of the program. Conducted with vigor by Andrew Bisantz and buoyantly staged by … [Read more...]
Lincoln Center duo brings week of Romantic music to Four Arts
It’s one thing to come and do a concert during the South Florida season, but it rises to another level when you’re able to bring your friends. This month at the Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach, the proprietors of New York’s Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the husband-and-wife team of cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han, will settle in for a week of … [Read more...]
Echols a gently winning Violetta in PB Opera’s ‘Traviata’
It’s a commonplace of Verdi scholarship that the composer’s “big three” operas of the early 1850s – Il Trovatore, Rigoletto and La Traviata – were game-changers for him in that they announced a consistent mature style in addition to introducing tunes so catchy they hold their popularity today. All of which is true, but it takes an especially sensitive and musical performance … [Read more...]
Mozart’s ‘Figaro’ speaks to a time of #MeToo
By Robert Croan Operagoers may think of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro as a quaint and old- fashioned, lighthearted comedy. That’s wrong, as audiences will learn when they attend Florida Grand Opera’s revival of the work, which opened at Miami’s Adrienne Arsht Center on Saturday. When Mozart composed his opera in 1786, the play that was its basis was considered so … [Read more...]
Superb singing, direction make South Florida SO’s ‘Porgy’ a triumph
By Robert Croan It’s an admirable and ambitious undertaking for a regional orchestra to put on a staged production of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. It’s also expensive ($350,000 budget in this case) and risky. South Florida Symphony took those risks, went all the way and offered Porgy and Bess as its featured production this season, with performances – led by music director … [Read more...]
Seraphic Fire’s African-American program deep and vital
The African-American musical tradition is a vast one, extending as it does from that day 400 years ago that the first enslaved Africans were brought to the English colonies that became the United States, to the hip-hop titans of our current popular music universe. And while much of that music is steeped in sorrow, there is also much of it that expresses joy in life, and … [Read more...]
Seraphic Fire program to explore African-American musical legacy
When Seraphic Fire takes the stage tonight at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in Boca Raton for a concert called I Have a Dream, they’ll be doing more than bringing attention to the vital literature of the African-American spiritual tradition. In addition to such beloved examples of black American sacred folksong as “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho” and “Go Down, Moses,” the … [Read more...]
Soprano Jones stands out in Wolf songs at FGO Liederabend
By Robert Croan Lied is the German word for song (plural: Lieder). A Liederabend is an evening of German songs, usually the songs of the great 19th and early 20th-century composers – among them Beethoven, Schubert, Richard Strauss and Hugo Wolf. Their songs were the popular music of their time, at first rooted in folksong but eventually expanding in scope to encompass … [Read more...]
Violinist’s excellence obscured by poky tempi at Palm Beach Symphony
The arrival on the musical scene of a fresh young soloist talent is always worth noting, and in the case of the South Korean violinist SooBeen Lee, she’s been getting a lot of major attention. Lee, who turned 18 in September, is currently studying with the great pedagogue Miriam Fried at the New England Conservatory, the Boston school where she won the concerto competition … [Read more...]
Delphi Trio offers meaty program of canonical works at Flagler
The Delphi Trio, a San Francisco-based threesome of piano, violin and cello, made a stop in South Florida on Tuesday night in a different guise than expected. Founding pianist Jeffrey LaDeur has left the group to “pursue other projects,” said violinist Liana Bérubé, and so she and cellist Michelle Kwon were joined by Tampa-based pianist Eunmi Ko at the Flagler Museum for a … [Read more...]