a virtual journal and essential blog of the classical music scene in greater Boston
Lee Eiseman, publisher; Robert Levin, advisor; David Moran, assisting editor; Bettina A. Norton, emerita editor
News & Features
August 12, 2018
Sounds Project Oceanic Light
by Christopher Wilkins
Boston Landmarks Orchestra joins with the New England Aquarium to turn the Hatch Shell into a seashell next Wednesday, as cetacean song and Debussy’s La Mer evoke the mysterious power and psychological depths of wind and waves. Stella Sung’s seascape discourses a watery dialogue between marine and human life, while Moby Dick rises again in [continued]
August 8, 2018
范曾玥 To Play Schumann Concerto
by BMINT STAFF
The Mercury Orchestra will provide blessed relief from Boston’s summer orchestral doldrums at Sanders Theater on Saturday at 8:00 in an all-Schumann concert featuring the 14-year-old winner of the Foundation for Chinese Performing Arts Concerto Competition. Over the 11 years that Channing Yu’s Mercury Orchestra has brought “amateur orchestra musicians together … to play [continued]
July 29, 2018
Verdi Wakes the Grateful Dead
by Christopher Wilkins
Next Wednesday, weather gods permitting, will find the Boston Landmarks Orchestra, One City Choir, Back Bay Chorale, and a quartet of soloists combining forces in Verdi’s monumental Requiem, a work Hans von Bülow described as “opera in church vestments.” After playing the immortally sprightly overture to Rossini’s “Semiramide,” artistic director Christopher Wilkins will summon hushed, [continued]
July 19, 2018
Famous Factotum To Cheer Watertown
by BMINT STAFF
For its lucky 13th season, Boston Midsummer Opera celebrates the immortal shenanigans of Rossini’s Barber of Seville. The master of opera buffa sees to the improper arrangements of dowries, ladders, love, noise, triangles, mistaken identity, and headaches through splendid musical hilarity, and yes, there is collusion. Susan Davenny-Wyner directs a crack orchestra and a lively [continued]
July 13, 2018
Pompous, Celestial, Celebratory, and Free
by Christopher Wilkins
The Boston Landmarks Orchestra’s 12th season of free concerts on the Esplanade wakens the Hatch Shell Wednesday at 7:00, during what is also the 90th summer that Bostonians have gathered on the Esplanade to hear live orchestral music since 1929, when Arthur Fiedler began the tradition. Landmarks’ music director Christopher Wilkins opens with suitably ceremonial [continued]
July 10, 2018
Oliver Knussen, 1952-2018
by Mark DeVoto
Oliver Knussen’s recent passing leaves modern music at a terrible loss. He was a composer of our own era who wrote very good music, and no less than that, he was a conductor who cared about sustaining the modern era in performance. Only 66 years old when he died Sunday, he had suffered from significant [continued]
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July 6, 2018
BSO: Is Its Pay Policy Suitable?
by Vance R. Koven
So, the question that’s burning everyone’s mind this week (or is it just that the heatwave has toasted everyone’s mind?) is whether the BSO’s first-chair flute player is worth as much (speaking strictly in dollars and cents) as its first-chair oboist. Or, put more correctly (as opposed to concisely), is the amended Massachusetts Equal Pay [continued]
July 2, 2018
Newport News, 2018
by BMINT STAFF
Over 19 gilded days and nights, the Newport Music Festival’s 52 embedded musicians will enliven mansions, churches, tents, and museums with engaging mainstream offerings of chambermusic, vocal extravaganzas, and more various fares. The 43-concert festival brings Joshua Bell, A Far Cry, Imani Winds, Jake Heggie, Charlie Albright, and Frederica von Stade to such venues as [continued]
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June 27, 2018
BSO Chorus Is a-Changin’
by BMINT STAFF
When in the course of symphonic events a new music director materializes, contracts likely protect performing personnel from firings. By contrast, when the new director of a volunteer chorus asks its members to reaudition, especially when doing so pointedly, and taking a new tack, few impediments exist. Why would any arts news organization pay attention? [continued]
June 15, 2018
Meditating on the “Bounded Fields of Time”
by Richard Knox
All of us — well, except those who achieve Nirvana — rebel against time. We want to hold onto it, retrieve it, freeze it, even reverse it. And humans have always yearned for a release from time’s iron grip – an impossible return to an Edenic existence. (And what is a heavenly afterlife but lux [continued]
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June 8, 2018
Concert Marketing 101
by BMINT STAFF
New England Conservatory recently announced the inaugural group of NEC’s Entrepreneurial Musicianship (EM) Nova Fellows, a new student-run music-presenting collaborative sponsored in part by a generous anonymous donor. EM Nova, a transformation of Symphony Nova, a professional development fellowship program founded in 2007 for orchestral musicians, will be integrating its operations into NEC’s entrepreneurial musicianship [continued]
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May 30, 2018
Fempowering Opera
by BMINT STAFF
Nine divas from two centuries locked in the afterlife and pitted against one another will fight for the soul of opera—what couldn’t go right? OperaHub’s timely new play with music DIVAS is a female-powered world premiere written by Boston playwright Laura Neill and packed with true stories, extravagant fashion, and gorgeous music. Including 13 selections [continued]
May 25, 2018
Like Halcyon Barques to Portsmouth’s Shores
by BMINT STAFF
“What sorts of images and associations does the term ‘halcyon’ bring to mind,” our writer Mike Rocha wondered three years back. Honey-colored light and dappled shade? Warm summer zephyrs? Nostalgic yearnings? For its fifth season, the Halcyon Music Festival will offer six exuberant chamber music concerts at the sumptuously decorative and acoustically rich confines of [continued]
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May 19, 2018
NEC Celebrates Itself & Sings Tchaikovsky
by BMINT STAFF
Tatyana Dudochkin, a member of the NEC Preperatory School piano faculty, will present her 28th-annual Jordan Hall concert honoring a composer in an anniversary year. This year, the Conservatory itself will share the spotlight with Tchaikovsky on Thursday at 7:30. Each year, she told BMInt, “I consider several composers until I am burning with enthusiasm, [continued]
May 17, 2018
Cambridge Acoustician Recognized
by BMINT STAFF
The Acoustical Society of America presents its prestigious Wallace Clement Sabine Award “to an individual of any nationality who has furthered the knowledge of architectural acoustics, as evidenced by contributions to professional journals and periodicals or by other accomplishments in the field of architectural acoustics.” The most recent winner, named last fall (it is not [continued]
May 11, 2018
Chamber Fest Rocks On Anew
by BMINT STAFF
The first Rockport Chamber Music Festival under the artistic direction of Barry Shiffman opens Friday June 15th and continues through Sunday July 15th. The dramatic theme for 2018 is r:EVOLUTION. Building on the its history of presenting high-caliber classical musicians, Festival artistic director Shiffman is making several enhancements: composer-in-residence (Osvaldo Golijov this season) , Rockport [continued]
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May 7, 2018
Invoking the Purcellian Parry
by Edward Elwyn Jones
The Harvard-Radcliffe Chorus’s veddy British “A Parry Premiere: Invocation to Music, and a Variety of Tidbits,” on Friday at 8:00 at Sanders Theater, will include the U.S. premiere of C. Hubert H. Parry’s Invocation to Music: In Honour of Henry Purcell, a cantata of melodic grandeur. Blest Pair of Sirens, a favorite of the British [continued]
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May 5, 2018
“Essential Voices”
by BMINT STAFF
The Boston-based Back Bay Chorale, an auditioned chorus of approximately 120 voices led by Music Director Scott Allen Jarrett, draws experienced singers from the metropolitan area. Founded in 1973 by Larry Hill, a famously charismatic figure even 29 years after his death, the Chorale created a musical ministry to bring artistic enrichment and education to [continued]
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April 30, 2018
Roosters To Crow at Trinity
by BMINT STAFF
The world-renowned a cappella male vocal ensemble Chanticleer is celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2018 with a tour that includes Boston’s Trinity Church, Copley Square on Friday, May 4th at 7:30pm. Founded in San Francisco by Louis Botto in 1978, the group is celebrated as much for its astoundingly wide range of repertoire as for [continued]
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April 27, 2018
Boston Troubadour Remembers Essential Frenchman
by Joel Cohen
The main thing to know about Jean-Claude Malgoire was that he was a vivacious, imaginative, and intensely musical human being. All the rest, as the saying goes, is commentary. I remember Jean-Claude, short, bearded, and stocky, a demonstrative Mediterranean born and bred, serving his own, homemade, bean-and-basil soupe au pistou to a small gathering of [continued]
April 23, 2018
Cook Licks Own Fingers
by BMINT STAFF
Shakespeare Concerts will give the world premiere of The lady doth protest too much, by the composer Joseph Summer, as well as works by Serge Prokofiev, Howard Frazin, Binna Kim, Benjamin Pesetsky (also a BMInt contributor), and Thomas Schnauber on Friday April 27th at 8pm at Jordan Hall. A similar program repeats the next evening [continued]
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April 18, 2018
The Lost World of Florence Price
by Nathaniel Meyer
The Du Bois Orchestra will revive Price’s Mississippi River Suite in the second of a three-part series at the University Lutheran Church in Cambridge commemorating the 150th anniversary of the birth of W.E.B. Du Bois. [continued]
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April 16, 2018
Moving Right Along at 150
by BMINT STAFF
We’re all used to hearing fine New England Conservatory performances of all sizes in its Jordan Hall. Next Wednesday, as part of the celebration of the conservatory’s 150th birthday, the NEC Philharmonia will move down the street to Symphony Hall. Stanford and Norma Jean Calderwood director of orchestras Hugh Wolff, marking his 10th anniversary at [continued]
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John Oliver (1939–2018): An Appreciation
by Stephen H. Owades
One of the great figures in American choral music, John Oliver, died Wednesday April 11th after a long illness. He founded the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, the chorus of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, in 1970 and led it until his retirement in 2015. Before the formation of the TFC, the BSO had worked with a variety [continued]
April 15, 2018
Tristan and Iseult Entangle at Longy
by BMINT STAFF
The mythical couple emerges from the misty past next week at Longy in Boston Camerata’s “Tristan & Iseult: A Medieval Romance in Poetry and Music.” This iteration of the ancient love story, drawn entirely from authentic medieval sources, proposes a powerful and surprising rendition of the tale for modern audiences. The internationally acclaimed scenario and [continued]
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