Friday Performance Pick – 459

alfven

Alfvén, Aftonen We try to cover the widest possible repertoire here, something will necessarily take a lot of time, and not focus too much on any one composer, genre, or performer. That said, we have turned frequently to Voces8 in this series. I’m not sure … Read more

Proverbs

proverbs

I’m sitting at my granddaughter’s desk in her fourth-grade classroom. By her age, the desks are nearly adult-sized, for which I am grateful. The students are at lunch and the room is quiet, which has allowed me to set up a brief presentation on “Resources … Read more

Friday Performance Pick – 458

jerome-kern

Kern, Bill A short while ago, we did a webinar on the 1927 musical Show Boat as part of our series “A Night at the Opera.” Show Boat was a groundbreaking work and arguably the first of the genre of opera that we call “Broadway … Read more

Enthusiasm in Retrospect

ringaround

Today I am presenting a post that goes back a while (well, eleven years to be exact). The post itself floated up while searching my files for prose to complement a new talk I am giving at this year’s conferences: a consideration of the critical, … Read more

Friday Performance Pick – 457

xenakis

Xenakis, Rebonds B Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) was born to Greek parents in a Greek community in Romania. In 1932, he began attending a boarding school in Greece where he studied music while also excelling in mathematics. He entered the National Technical School in Athens in … Read more

Cats

cats

Last weekend, I revisited the 1981 musical Cats, screening it for the grandkids with a certain amount of festivity (pillows and popcorn). The connections they made were terrific, their questions spot on, and overall, it was a hit. A few days later, while reviewing video … Read more

Friday Performance Pick – 456

schumann

Schumann, Piano Quartet The chamber music of Robert Schumann (1810-1856) makes up a relative small portion of his large corpus of works. An extremely accomplished pianist, his compositions focus heavily on that instrument: works for solo piano, a piano concerto, and an enormous body of … Read more