Condemned to Music

"Beautiful pianist!" Such was the backstage verbal shorthand among Philadelphia Orchestra musicians at the Kimmel Center after Maria João Pires rehearsed May 16 for her first U.S. concert since 1999.. Replacing Maurizio Pollini, she interrupted her designated free month to play Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2 both in Philadelphia and at Carnegie Hall in what were Charles Dutoit's final concerts as the orchestra's chief conductor. Pianophiles know her as one of the great artists of our time. To nearly everyone else in the United States, where … [Read more...]

Amid the polite veneer of the symphonic world, composer/conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen's unmediated honesty can be one of the more delightful sources of provocative wisdom. With the x-ray vision of a composer and the irreverent viewpoint of an outsider (he's Finnish), Salonen has long cut through the sanctimoniousness of serious music and says what few people could with his level of insight. Example: In a recent hour spent with the former Los Angeles Philharmonic music director during a guest-conducting engagement with the Philadelphia … [Read more...]

Great music often takes on the color of its surroundings, but Vespers does so more than most musical containers - if only because, in most cases, the music is assembled to suit the particular occasion. Claudio Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610 was the big exception, something consciously composed and published as a whole entity (as opposed to something pieced together out of anthologies of psalm settings and the like, which is the usual procedure for a Vespers service). Having had great success with the 1610 Vespers over the past two years, the … [Read more...]

Opera-goers are losing their theatrical innocence, at least in conservative Metropolitan Opera circles, as opera starts looking like something that actually belongs in the 21st century. Considering how innocence is a distant memory among the world's Joan Sutherland widows, you'd think they would welcome virginity in any form - even as they're losing it. If nothing else, there's novelty value when much of what you think you know about an opera is up-ended, not by another crazy instance of German directors' opera, but by something more … [Read more...]

Snow in sound. A blizzard of music. Silver bells - refracted into fractals, millions of them coming from everywhere around you. No surprise, then, that Unsilent Night, Phil Kline's holiday ambient music piece that fits all of the above descriptions has spread to nearly 30 cities over the past 20 years - no doubt one of the few holiday traditions to being on the once edgy Lower East Side. Composed for not-quite-synchronized cassette tapes in boom boxes - carried in public processionals by however many people turn up for the occasion - … [Read more...]

To see Montserrat Figueras and Jordi Savall at the San Francisco airport - as I once did after they appeared at the Berkeley Early Music Festival - was to mistake them for a typical middle-aged hippie couple. Their hair was long and dark, clothes were casual and baggage was guitar cases. Typical, they were not. Together, they gave voice to distant centuries of music, from as far back as recorded Western music history can go through the 17th century and, occasionally, beyond. Yet the literal voice of their ensemble, Hespèrion XX, belonged … [Read more...]

Legend has it that one of Jean Sibelius' favorite drinking games in his later years was to spend the evening with his buddies, prodigiously imbibing as only the Finns can, though ending the evening with one of them abruptly shut into a closet for 15 minutes or so. And then, from the other side of the door, the closeted partier was ordered to give the full names of the people with whom he had spent the evening. Just to see if he was too hammered to do so. Or had passed out. No wonder Sibelius never finished his Symphony No. 8. But … [Read more...]

Unlike the protagonist of Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris" film, classical music listeners don't need to wait for a mysterious car to pull up to take them to an earlier time. No, I'm not talking about how the great masterpieces take us back in time. They don't. They redefine our own time. But the actual sounds of decades past can be time travel indeed, but not just any of them. Polished commercial recordings, however valuable, are often less revealing than the tapes and discs of live performances that didn't have posterity breathing down necks … [Read more...]

In a year riddled with financial ills, the Philadelphia Orchestra's opening night had a near-death experience last week when a threatened Kimmel Center strike could've shut down the gala fundraiser and guest soloist Dawn Upshaw canceled due to a death in the family. However, the gala decamped to the University of Pennsylvania campus and Upshaw was replaced by Deborah Voigt, who took off from rehearsing Wagner at the Metropolitan Opera to sing George Gershwin (among others) in Philadelphia. Voigt used a microphone - except for "My Man's Gone … [Read more...]

Stepping into the mind of a famous opera singer is almost certainly dangerous territory. What would you find there? Visions of an ideal performance? Shadows of less-perfect ones? Voodoo dolls representing artistic rivals? Crucified critics? Let's not even guess how Placido Domingo envisioned Washington Post critic Anne Midgette following her accusation that his conducting sabotaged the Washington National Opera's production of Tosca. For the first time in his life, Domingo wrote a letter to the editor in protest. Ultimately, he called … [Read more...]