By Dennis D. Rooney Cellist Jacob Shaw and pianist David Lau Magnussen brought to a close this season’s Classical Café concerts at the Duncan Theatre’s Stage West on March 29. The room was designed for easily understood speech. Its dry acoustics reinforce that quality. Music fares less well there. Although these players did not especially seek tonal elegance, their … [Read more...]
PB Opera wraps season with Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Pirates of Penzance’
Time was when the English comic operettas of William Schwenk Gilbert (words) and Arthur Sullivan (music) were a regular feature of amateur theatrical activity around this country. It had been that way since the late 1870s, when a national craze in the U.S. for one of their shows, H.M.S. Pinafore, monopolized the popular culture, with theater troupes presenting pirated … [Read more...]
Group offers bluegrass version of Who’s ‘Tommy’ at the Duncan
By Dale King The rock opera Tommy, guitarist Pete Townshend’s high-powered musical about a “deaf, dumb and blind kid” who becomes a “pinball wizard” despite his sensory and other personal obstacles, stops by the Duncan Theatre on the Lake Worth campus of Palm Beach State College at 8 p.m. Wednesday. The show will be performed in its 75-minute entirety, but in a completely … [Read more...]
Concertos by Mozart, Diamond make Symphonia concert special
Every musical season in South Florida brings with it a plenitude of concerti featuring the violin, the piano, and the cello, with an occasional clarinet or flute doing the honors. But it’s rare to hear a concerto for the horn, and so it was especially welcome Sunday to hear the next-to-last concert of the season by the Symphonia Boca Raton, which featured the well-known … [Read more...]
PB Opera’s Liederabend a fine showcase for standout young singers
If you’re looking for the next Marilyn Horne, Luciano Pavarotti or Herman Prey, look no further than the Young Artists of Palm Beach Opera. I heard eight of them sing last March 16 in the lovely Royal Poinciana Chapel meeting room on Palm Beach, in which every seat had been sold. This was the opera troupe’s fifth annual Liederabend — German for “evening of song” — an … [Read more...]
Bennett Group plays impressive concert of jazz crossover
With brick-and-mortar retail music stores having mostly fallen by the wayside in our current, internet-driven musical reality, genres and stylistic labels have become less important for categorization — and the New York City-based Daniel Bennett Group is taking full advantage, with its namesake, multi-wind-instrumental leader having realized long ago that such tags weren’t all … [Read more...]
Pianist Chochieva persuasive in Chopin at Boca Steinway Gallery
By Dennis D. Rooney The Steinway Gallery Boca Raton’s performance space, located at the rear of the showroom floor, was filled to capacity March 20 for a recital by Russian artist Zlata Chochieva, sponsored by Piano Lovers of South Florida. Chochieva, a 32-year-old native Muscovite, studied with, notably, Mikhail Pletnev, and is a 2012 alumna of the Moscow State … [Read more...]
RSNO, brilliant Benedetti make for exceptional night of music
Founded in 1891 as the Scottish Orchestra in Edinburgh, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra added the word “National” in 1951 and in 1977, when Queen Elizabeth II became its patron, the word “Royal” took precedence as its prefix. Over the years great conductors have led the orchestra: Sir John Barbirolli, Walter Susskind and George Szell to name three. Its principal … [Read more...]
Tao’s new concerto a triumph at Atlantic Classical
World premieres are special occasions, and I was privileged to hear young Conrad Tao’s thrilling new piano concerto with the composer at the keyboard on March 8 at the Eissey Campus Theatre in Palm Beach Gardens, for a concert with the Atlantic Classical Orchestra. Winner of orchestra’s Rappaport Prize for Music Composition, Tao, 22, dazzled the audience with his pianistic … [Read more...]
FGO’s ‘Before Night Falls’ an important work, strongly cast
The life of Cuba after the Revolution of 1959 has been the subject of endless amounts of prose and heated arguments, but it also makes a good subject for an opera. In May 2010, the Cuban-American composer Jorge Martín saw his opera on this subject, Before Night Falls, take the stage for the first time at the Fort Worth Opera in Texas. On Saturday night, he was on hand again … [Read more...]