News & Features

July 10, 2018

Oliver Knussen, 1952-2018

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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?

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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]

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July 2, 2018

Newport News, 2018

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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’

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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]

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June 15, 2018

Meditating on the “Bounded Fields of Time”

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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

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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

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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]

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May 25, 2018

Like Halcyon Barques to Portsmouth’s Shores

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“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

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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]

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May 17, 2018

Cambridge Acoustician Recognized

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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]

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May 11, 2018

Chamber Fest Rocks On Anew

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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

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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”

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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

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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

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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]

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April 23, 2018

Cook Licks Own Fingers

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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

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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

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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

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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]

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April 15, 2018

Tristan and Iseult Entangle at Longy

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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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April 13, 2018

Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund Announces 2018 Winner

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At its annual meeting, the Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund board unanimously chose as its 2018 competition prizewinner the 25-year-old pianist Jean Sélim Abdelmoula, from Switzerland, granting him a prize of $5000. Judge András Schiff had nominated Abdelmoula. “An uncommonly poetic musician”, according to The New York Times, Abdelmoula received first prizes at the 2012 Edvard    [continued]

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April 9, 2018

Operatic Immersion at JP Brewery

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Thought about being young, penniless, and in love? Ever wanted to share a drink with the denizens of Café Momus? Did you like Rent?  If the answer is yes to two out of three of these questions, then by all means plan to experience Boston Opera Collaborative’s site specific La Bohème, where industrial racks will    [continued]

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April 5, 2018

BSO’s Economic Muscle Grew 40% in the Last Decade

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Beyond the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s benefits (tangible, musical, spiritual) to the 1.2 million people who attended its concerts in the past year, the organization’s activities led to $261 million in “economic impact” in our Commonwealth. An analysis the BSO commissioned from Williams College economics professor Stephen Shepard shows the impact to have grown 40% over    [continued]

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March 31, 2018

Club Commissions Daniel Strong Godfrey

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Each season since 2013, the Boston Chamber Music Society Commissioning Club, made up of nearly 30 households of patrons and subscribers, has supported the creation of a new work that features our member musicians and strengthens our commitment to the continuation of our art in our time. Past composers include George Tsontakis, Pierre Jalbert, Harold    [continued]

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March 25, 2018

NEC Quartets To Be Fêted

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New England Conservatory celebrates its Professional String Quartet Training Program with three concerts in seven days, recognizing six of the ensembles that have participated since the program’s origins, in September 11th,  2001. The three Jordan Hall concerts, also marking NEC’s 150th anniversary, take place on: April 1st – Jupiter and Parker Quartets, 7:30pm; April 4th    [continued]

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