Tchaikovsky – Hudson-Housatonic Arts

Locke’s List for 2020: Major Discoveries and Pleasant Diversions in Operatic and Other Vocal Music (Plus a Ballet to a Scenario by Arthur Schnitzler)

January 2, 2021January 2, 2021Ralph P. Locke

What a strange, scary, and remarkable year 2020 has been, in all our lives! The social isolation that I have carried out pretty consistently has led me to look to music even more than usual for solace, enlightenment, and pleasant distraction. I gather that many music lovers have traveled a somewhat similar path since mid-March.

My penchant for opera, and for vocal music and for the theatre generally, has led me to get to know a number of recent CD releases, many of which I have reviewed for American Record Guide or for various online magazines.

Stefan Asbury conducts Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 6 with the TMC Orchestra. Photo Hilary Scott.

A Singer’s Notes 150: Tchaikovsky at Tanglewood

August 27, 2019August 27, 2019Keith Kibler

The July 15 performance by the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra of the Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6 “Pathétique” was a highlight of my listening this summer. Conductor Stefan Asbury led a performance I will never forget. Thank you to the many wonderful young players who achieved it!

Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra conducted by Killian Farrell, Nathan Aspinall, and Andris Nelsons, with Thomas Rolfs, trumpet soloist; July 8, 2019: Iconoclastic Shostakovich, plus Bombastic Tchaikovsky, Ingenious Glanert, Giddy Berlioz: the TMC Orchestra’s First Concert of 2019

July 12, 2019July 27, 2019Larry Wallach

The job of a critic has two elements: the first is to report the facts of a performance: what was played, by whom, and what the music and performance were like in objective terms, as far as possible (never fully successful); and the second is to offer some judgments about the quality of both music and performance. This second part is fraught with difficulties: judgments are necessarily subjective, and yet in order for them to be useful to the reader, they need to be justified in terms of the values upon which they are based, especially since the critic is fully aware that his/her long-held prejudices (euphemistically called convictions) are not necessarily shared by readers.

Dmitri Shostakovich and Ludwig van Beethoven

Boston Symphony Orchestra: Looking Up

October 12, 2017October 12, 2017Charles Warren

Writing here recently about last season at the Boston Symphony, I had recourse more than once to the phrase “just notes going by” in response to Andris-Nelsons-led performances that I did not like (I did praise a number of performances as well). I am happy to say that I think no one would say “just notes going by” about the recent, September 28th concert which opened the orchestra’s subscription series for 2017-2018. First, Nelsons and the orchestra and soloist Paul Lewis presented a definite view of the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 4 in G-major, Opus 58; they had something to say with it. And the large Shostakovich Symphony No. 11 (“The Year 1905”) which followed, seemed to come into its own and express itself as fully as one could imagine.

Gil Shaham’s Tchaikovsky and Bach: Double Virtuosity

August 26, 2016August 26, 2016Larry Wallach

Gil Shaham’s double appearance at Tanglewood made a powerful statement: that he was the master of both ends of the spectrum of virtuosity, with the implication that every other challenge would fall somewhere in between. On the one hand, there was a visceral, mercurial, spontaneous and totally commanding performance of the Tchaikovsky concerto, a work whose technical challenges are so great that it was supposed to have been declared unplayable by its intended first performer.

The Year that Was: Boston Classical Music in 2015

December 24, 2015December 24, 2015Lloyd Schwartz

The major news from Boston was the ascendancy of Andris Nelsons, firming up his place as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which included a quickly agreed upon three-year extension of his contract into the 2020-2021 season. This announcement was soon followed by the less happy surprise for Bostonians of Nelsons also accepting an offer from the eminent Leipzig Gewandhaus, the orchestra whose music director was once no less than Felix Mendelssohn, to take on that very position, beginning in the 2017-2018 season, thus dividing the loyalties of the young maestro (who just turned 37), though evidently with the possibility of collaborations between the two orchestras. (Remember when some people were complaining about James Levine dividing his time between the BSO and the Metropolitan Opera?)

A Singer’s Notes 103: A Concert and a Rehearsal

February 15, 2015Keith Kibler

There was none of the usual Russian overdrive in Ignat Solzhenitsyn’s performance with the fabled Mariinsky Orchestra last week in the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall. This worked well in selections from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, music which burns hot in performances by this orchestra and its regular music director Valery Gergiev.

Andris Nelson conducts the BSO at Tanglewood. Photo Hilary Scott.

Two Weekends in the Country: The BSO and the Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood, Jacob’s Pillow, the new Clark, Mass MoCA, and Boston Midsummer Opera’s Bartered Bride

August 10, 2014August 13, 2014Lloyd Schwartz

As life in the city slows down, life in the country west of Boston ratchets up. I went out to the Berkshires to catch as much as I could of Tanglewood’s fiftieth Festival of Contemporary Music, this year curated by Boston composers and longtime Tanglewood faculty members John Harbison (a composition fellow in 1959) and Michael Gandolfi (a fellow in 1986).