Michael Tilson Thomas conducts Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind at the New World Center on Saturday. (Photo by Gregory Reed) When the music had finished and the audience in the New World Center had risen to its collective feet, Michael Tilson Thomas knelt down on one knee and kissed the garment of his soloist, soprano Measha Brueggergosman. And well he might: … [Read more...]
New work opens Seraphic Fire season in compelling style
The United States has a long, rich choral music tradition that extends from the Moravians to William Billings, from spirituals to Morten Lauridsen. And now there are a number of prominent younger composers diligently adding to this repertoire. Minnesota-based Jake Runestad, who is only 29, is among these creators, and his new cantata, The Hope of Loving, had its world premiere … [Read more...]
Letter from Tanglewood: Concert honors American masters
All music was once new. But in America, ever since Serge Koussevitzky founded the Berkshire Music Center on July 8, 1940, in Lenox, Mass., composers and their new music found a home for experimentation and performance. Randall Thompson’s Alleluia was the inaugural piece that balmy summer afternoon at Tanglewood, summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in July and August … [Read more...]
At Flagler, Fine Arts’ Tchaikovsky outshines its Mozart
The well-established Fine Arts Quartet came to the Flagler Museum for the penultimate concert of the museum’s 2015 music series on Feb. 17. Originally founded in Chicago in 1946, the two violinists, Ralph Evans and Efim Boico, have been its mainstay for the past 31 years. Juan-Miguel Hernandez is the violist and Robert Cohen, the cellist. Known as one of the “gold-plated” … [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...]
Judy Garland concert drama at Arts Garage unmissable
Why would Lou Tyrrell bring to his Theatre at Arts Garage a play that he presented at Florida Stage seven years ago? “We are really more in audience development mode than we are in play development mode,” he says of his fledgling Delray Beach operation. And if ever there were a show to attract and expand his audience, it is surely Beyond the Rainbow, a well-crafted biography … [Read more...]
New World’s bracing concert at Boca Fest deserved bigger audience
By Donald Waxman On the next-to-the-last evening of the 2013 Festival of the Arts Boca, Peter Oundjian, the Canadian conductor and violinist, led the New World Symphony of Miami in three early 20th-century works. The guest soloist was the Russian-American pianist Valentina Lisitsa, whose career in recent years has flourished in an unprecedented way. The program promised to be … [Read more...]
Pianist Ahn impressive in solo, duo recital
Although it was billed as a solo recital, pianist Hyojin Ahn’s concert Wednesday afternoon at the Duncan Theatre’s Stage West also featured a violinist in a major modernist work from the 1920s, and that piece as much as anything else Ahn did helped make this musical event a memorable one. Ahn, 32, a South Korea-born musician who is a piano fellow at Miami Beach’s New World … [Read more...]
Lynn opens new concert hall; venues set 2010-11 classical series
Lynn University on Thursday opened its new $14.9 million concert hall, adding a much-needed venue for theater and music in south Palm Beach County. The Keith C. and Elaine Johnson Wold Performing Arts Center, which took about 18 months to build, features a 752-seat hall with adjustable acoustic panels, a video studio, plus scene and costume shops, and soon will have an … [Read more...]
‘Alexander Nevsky’ concert unusual but compelling
In his recent study of Sergei Prokofiev's Soviet career, the musicologist Simon Morrison reveals that the composer was a huge movie buff, and that for one tantalizing moment, had a chance to do a film score in Hollywood for Paramount. It didn't happen, but Prokofiev never stopped trying to write theater and film scores in the Soviet Union, and with Sergei Eisenstein in 1938, … [Read more...]