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2024-04-21
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2021-03-22 13:31:21
Bartok & more, 2021
This Week in Classical Music: March 15, 2021. Bartók and much more. Béla Bartók’s 140th birthday is on March 25th. Bartók was one of the most brilliant composers of the 20th century, and we feel that these days he is not being played as often as he should be. Maybe it’s a temporary problem: even though his music is tonal in general terms, it may be too pungent for the Covid era. We’ve written about Bartók many times, for example here, here and here. A much more difficult, but also superb composer was born on March 26th of 1925: Pierre Boulez. There has been much public debating about the music of Boulez and other rigorously atonal and serialist composers such as Charles Wuorinen and Milton Babbitt. The young American composer and conductor, Matthew Aucoin wrote a scathing article in the NY Review of Books called Sound and Fury (very much […]
2015-11-16 15:37:21
In the ever-expanding realm of countertenors, Franco Fagioli is his own kind of phenomenon. A relative newcomer to the international stage, he gained immediate prominence in late 2012 with his role in Leonardo Vinci’s Artaserse (a castrato part so demanding that it hadn’t been sung by a male since the 1750s). Although Fagioli has since been nicknamed after the legendary Farinelli , his most recent concert at the Wigmore Hall consisted of arias written for Farinelli’s rival Caffarelli , punctuated by instrumental pieces and well-timed extempore banter between Fagioli and conductor Riccardo Minasi . A performance by so outstanding a singer would amount to much less without an equally strong set of instrumentalists. Il Pomo d’Oro , with whom Fagioli performed, are such an ensemble, a young group focusing on the revival of forgotten works and on historically informed practice. As cellist Ludovico Minasi informed me during the interval, all […]
2014-02-28 07:35:36
Farinelli from heaven
Many contemporary opera-lovers must rue that they can never hear such 19th century icons as Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient or Adolphe Nourrit or the Garcia sisters, Maria Malibran and Pauline Viardot. But my impossible wish would be to hear one of the great castrati who dominated opera for most of the 18th century. I’m not the only one intrigued by these (mercifully) now-extinct musical anomalies—it’s a fascination that continues into the 21st century as heard on three variously compelling recent castrato-oriented CDs by countertenors David Hansen, Franco Fagioli and Philippe Jaroussky. In addition, the latter’s current US tour stopped by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Grace Rainey Rogers auditorium Tuesday evening. The demanding life of a singer often requires a challenging combination of commitment and hard work, but no sacrifice compares to the practice which flourished from the 16th to the 19th century where thousands of young boys were castrated in […]
2014-02-01 07:00:37
Classical music: Here is update and analysis of this year’s Grammy Award winners in classical music. Plus, the Madison Symphony Chorus under conductor Beverly Taylor will sample American choral traditions this Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Overture Center.
By Jacob Stockinger The Ear’s friends at the Madison Symphony Orchestra have sent in the following announcement: “Can you name all the different distinctly American choral traditions? “Director Beverly Taylor (below, in a photo by Katrin Talbot) and the Madison Symphony Chorus will answer that question this Sunday afternoon, Feb. 2, at 2 p.m., when they’ll appear in “Apple Pie America: A Slice of Choral Americana” in Promenade Hall at the Overture Center for the Arts . (Taylor is also the head of the choral department at the university of Wisconsin-Madison , where she directs the UW Choral Union and UW Concert Choir , and is the assistant conductor of the Madison Symphony Orchestra. And sorry, I have so specific titles of works on the program but I have been told that the concert is closing in on being sold-out, with only a few tickets remaining.) The […]
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