American Bach led a stirring rendition of Handel’s Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, full of big questions and even bigger musical highlights.
An invigorating double bill at the San Francisco Symphony challenges how Bach “should” be performed.
A sublime Reginald Mobley and the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra are a balm for troubled times in a program of baroque selections and spirituals.
American Bach brings out the operatic side of Bach in a program featuring sparkling vocal talents.
Not really an opera book but, c’mon, it’s Bach.
If you love the astonishing vocal works of J. S. Bach, John Eliott Gardiner’s 2013 book is a deeply rewarding read.
There are two problems to address – problems of the sort the arts thrive on addressing.
On Tuesday night, in the commodious concert hall of the Morgan Library, the Boston Early Music Festival forces brought Georg Philipp Telemann’s Don Quichotte auf der Hochzeit des Comacho to New York.
How many hours of our lives are spent looking back?
On Saturday at Alice Tully Hall, Julliard 415, the school’s top-flight period-instrument ensemble, was joined by students from the Marcus Institute for Vocal Arts and Juilliard Drama for a rare semi-staging of King Arthur.
Wrapping up Diva November, Chris’s Cache offers two sacred works that couldn’t be more unalike.
Davóne Tines has sung with Early Music groups and avant-garde ones, and he has a taste for projects that cross artistic boundaries, which suits an innate showmanship.
“This used to be a funhouse… but now it’s full of evil clowns / It’s time to start the countdown…. I’m gonna burn it down”
Joyce DiDonato admits that she is “a problem solver, a dreamer, and—yes I’m a belligerent optimist.”
Los Angeles Opera’s St. Matthew Passion was by equal parts challenging and hypnotic to watch.
Teresa Zylis-Gara died in late August at 91 and Trove Thursday offers the Polish soprano in a wide-ranging collection of live material showcasing her great versatility.
While seasonally-awkward streams of Messiah abound, Trove Thursday turns instead to Berlioz’s exquisite L’Enfance du Christ from francophone forces including Stéphanie d’ Oustrac, Bernard Richter, Edwin Crossley-Mercer and Nicolas Testé (for once, sans sa femme).
In recent weeks local and visiting groups performed refreshing rarities by Zelenka, Domenico Scarlatti and Telemann so engagingly that one didn’t miss the old standbys at all.
An unusually provocative program by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s conducted by Bernard Labadie with soloists Lydia Teuscher and Benno Schachtner made my “return” Thursday evening an illuminating and rewarding experience at Zankel Hall.
An unstaged performance of Juditha Triumphans by five soloists and the Venice Baroque Orchestra under Andrea Marcon.
When Richard Wagner reached into the past and revised Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide, he went beyond the accepted boundaries of tinkering and more or less created a new work that’s fomented aesthetic debates ever since.
This DVD
of a Diana Damrau recital (accompanied only by the harpist Xavier de Maistre) is sure to please her legions of fans.
The chicken or the egg?
Some composers write as if the dividing line between instruments that play notes and the voice, which usually sings a text and takes some of its attitude towards the music from that text, were not an all-important factor.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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