Like a top-league soccer coach, Ramón Tebar has gotten his team to World Cup level. The Palm Beach Symphony, playing Jan. 27 at the new auditorium of Benjamin High School in Palm Beach Gardens, sounded like a major orchestra from Europe or the Americas. In my time covering this ensemble, Tebar has taken it from a refined chamber music ensemble of 35 players to a well-crafted … [Read more...]
Toronto Symphony opens Florida tour
You know the season has arrived in South Florida when you start seeing cars with license plates from Canada joining you on the road. And starting tonight, a group of accomplished visitors from the Great White North comes to West Palm Beach as the Toronto Symphony Orchestra begins its first Florida tour in five years. Joined by the 20-year-old Canadian pianist sensation Jan … [Read more...]
Fine new clarinet concerto debuts at Atlantic Classical Orchestra
Get ready: The Atlantic Classical Orchestra is coming. After four well-attended rehearsals in the Eissey Campus Theatre at Palm Beach State College in Palm Beach Gardens, they will give four Tuesday afternoon concerts there next season. Well known for its creative programming, after 24 years of playing in Vero Beach, Fort Pierce and Stuart, the ACO feels its brand of … [Read more...]
Festival Boca preview: Perlman collaborator looks to chamber music for ‘Eternal Echoes’
It’s a 1950s Saturday in Tel Aviv, in the fledgling state of Israel, and the radio’s playing cantorial music, as it always does on Saturdays. It’s music that sticks with one person in particular, a young, prodigiously talented young violinist who will soon make his mark in the world as a teenage phenomenon. But through all the decades and accolades that followed, Itzhak … [Read more...]
Cleveland Orchestra brilliant in Debussy, Strauss, ‘Rite’
By Donald Waxman On the weekend of Jan. 31, the Cleveland Orchestra gave its second pair of concerts in its current winter stint as the resident orchestra of the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in Miami. This was its eighth year in a residency that has become the highlight of the South Florida concert season. The orchestra’s musical director and permanent … [Read more...]
Soloist, orchestra, conductor soldier on during a deluge
Rain dominated the Palm Beach Symphony’s performance Jan. 9 at the Flagler Museum. Just when I thought artistic director Ramón Tebar had gotten it right by choosing only string music for the acoustically ripe “Railway Hall” (aka the pavilion on the grounds that houses Henry Flagler’s private rail coach), pouring rain, of enormous volume, hit the glass roof incessantly … [Read more...]
Philadelphia Orchestra, Watts bring freshness to the warhorses
There is a celebrated sign on the road to the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont that reads: Caution: Musicians at Play. That phrase suggests not just performers enjoying themselves in their craft, but also expert musicians who can do whatever they want with the material at hand and keep it fresh. That feeling of easeful mastery was all over the Kravis Center on Wednesday … [Read more...]
Orchestra’s ‘39’ concert steps up, sometimes eccentrically
As program-organizing gimmicks go, building one around a number is clever and useful, and for the Palm Beach Symphony, constructing its Sunday night program on “39” ― the group’s current anniversary year ― offered listeners an interesting variety of selections as well as a short course in the development of the Austro-German symphonic tradition. The concert in the Flagler … [Read more...]
Cuban orchestra’s States debut impressive, populist
From the protests outside the Kravis Center to the activists handing out literature on the way to the parking garage, the National Symphony Orchestra of Cuba drew plenty of outside attention Sunday afternoon as it wrapped up its first-ever American tour in West Palm Beach. Our nation’s policy wrangles with the island nearby may be on the verge of a new easing, if some of the … [Read more...]
Violist shines in Telemann at Stringendo concert
A violist for the Cleveland Orchestra made a persuasive case for the power and versatility of his instrument Tuesday night during a performance of a Telemann concerto at Palm Beach Atlantic University. Stanley Konopka, who has been assistant principal viola of the Cleveland since 1993, was one of two members of that orchestra featured in Tuesday’s concert, the second program … [Read more...]