On Monday, Wolf Trap Opera opened their Salon Series with a concert by two of their young artists: soprano Magdalena Kuzma and baritone Jonathan Patton. With limited seating in a…
Category: Recitals/Concerts
Charity Begins at Grange Festival for Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito
With its accumulating drama and superbly sung set pieces, this account of Mozart’s 1791 operatic farewell gave every reason why it should be heard more often, whether in fully staged…
Soprano Sondra Radvonovsky at the Princeton Festival
The Princeton Festival has recently emerged as a satisfying summer destination for opera lovers in the broader New York area. It presents one major opera annually and also a concert…
125 years young: Wigmore Hall celebrates with Lise Davidsen
Happy “birth”- day to Wigmore Hall (inasmuch as bricks and mortar are birthed). On the hall’s actual 125th anniversary, it was Lise Davidsen and the equally astonishing collaborative pianist James…
An Evening of Wagner: The LSO and Sir Simon Rattle in tremendous form
It is rather extraordinarily more than twenty years since I last heard Sir Simon Rattle conduct Wagner (Parsifal at the Proms) so this ‘An Evening of Wagner’ was a great opportunity…
Asmik Grigorian and Lukas Geniušas at Wigmore Hall
The Wigmore Hall’s 125th Anniversary Festival is shaping up well: in one day, the venue offered Jordi Savall at lunchtime and Asmik Grigorian in the evening, both (as far as…
Rattle Returns to the LSO with Gerhard, Richard Strauss and Mahler
Vocal qualities matter enormously. Not just when it comes to the process of casting in the opera house, but when radically different items are programmed together in concert. I have…
Washington Bach Consort Closes Season with Stunning Mass in B Minor
Composer Arnold Bax once compared Bach’s last movements to “the running of a sewing machine.” If that be the case, surely they constitute the most epic runnings of sewing machines…
Wozzeck as Photonovel at the Royal Festival Hall
101 years after its premiere in Berlin, Wozzeck remains the epitome of the modern opera. It also remains astonishing: for its musical sophistication as Berg’s score morphs from scene to…
Ring excerpts in San Francisco
San Francisco Symphony offered a brief Wagnerian orgy just now — a 65 minute orchestral concoction made of bits of Rheingold, Walküre, Siegried and Gotterdammerung. It began in the very darkened…