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...]
The complicated success of Greg Holden
By Hilary Saunders Greg Holden sounds like he still has a little chip on his shoulder. The young British singer/songwriter has found great success in the music industry since 2012, just not in ways that he expected, or perhaps wanted. That year, a song he wrote called “Home” debuted on the American Idol season finale, as contestant Phillip Phillips used it as his “coronation … [Read more...]
The Both: Friendly collaboration, musical powerhouse
By Hilary Saunders Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks, who will be performing this weekend at the Sunshine Music and Blues Festival they curated, aren’t the only formidable duo who will take the stage at the Mizner Park Amphitheatre. Guitarist, bassist, and vocalist Aimee Mann — who established herself as one of the most adaptable and influential female musicians in the early … [Read more...]
Chamber Society eyes Breakers expansion; unpublished Bernstein piece at Four Arts tonight
If all the stars align correctly, look for the Chamber Music Society of Palm Beach, which now mounts its programs at Mar-a-Lago, to add The Breakers as a concert venue next season. The executive director of the society, Michael Finn, said wants to add three concerts at the landmark resort for the 2015-16 season if he can get approval from the society’s board to do it. … [Read more...]
Late review: In Grieg sonatas, Joshua Bell finds riches
The splendid American violinist Joshua Bell has been making something of a study of the three sonatas of Edvard Grieg in his regular recital tours. Although the Third Sonata is the most well-known of the three, he was very excited about the Sonata No. 2 when he took it out on a tour a few years back, as he told me during an interview at the time; he said in some ways he liked … [Read more...]
Chamber fest returns this week with second fall festival
The second-ever winter series of the long-running Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival opens this week for a set of three programs over three months that will include a world premiere, a further exploration of two off-the-beaten path composers, and the appearance of a masterwork the festival is tackling for the first time in its two-decade history. Launched last year, the PBCMF … [Read more...]
Palm Beach Chamber Festival set to open 23rd season
What is surely one of Palm Beach County’s longest-running summer concert series returns tonight for its 23rd season, as some of the area’s best-known classical musicians gather for four weekends of chamber music. The works on this year’s iteration of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival are perhaps more unfamiliar than usual, but the programming of music that’s off the beaten … [Read more...]
Mainly Mozart’s chamber music-dance finale enchants large audience
The directors of Miami’s Mainly Mozart Festival made much June 22 of the crowd they’d lured to the Knight Concert Hall for their chamber music summer season closer, subtitled My Homeland. And indeed the mood in the big hall at the Arsht Center downtown was festive and celebratory, and they were rewarded with a concert that took the strong and innovative format from last year’s … [Read more...]
Music, science link arms for Max Planck lecture series in Jupiter
If you were to list the names of prominent scientists who also were interested in music, you’d be at it for some time. Along with the more or less well-known examples of chemist-composer Alexander Borodin, physician-organist Albert Schweitzer and physicist-violinist Albert Einstein, you could find any number of physicians, chemists, botanists, surgeons, astronomers and the … [Read more...]
Grosvenor brilliant at Four Arts
By Donald Waxman Benjamin Grosvenor, the much-heralded young British pianist, is only 21, but he began performing in public and winning awards at the age of 10 and hasn’t stopped since. His current concert itinerary shows him playing two or three solo or orchestral concerts a week worldwide for the entirety of the concert season. For his recital at the Society of the Four … [Read more...]