The Fine Balance and Its Inevitable Path

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The final installment of “A Fine Balance: Piano Music by Women and Men”  paired female composers with male counterparts, based on the timbre, character, and theme of the music. Keeping with the unmatched tradition of this series, two young pianists from the preparatory school, joined the festivities in a unique and inspiring partnership.   [continued]

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Young Orchestra Brightens Colorful Church

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Schmoozing with the audience before the concert and during the intermission at Church of the Covenant in Boston, Horizon Ensemble’s volunteer players, inspired by their bon-vivant leader Julian Gau, broadened and diversified  concert protocols into something resembling a college mixer. Further democratizing, the orchestra was seated without risers, though that obscured most of the players   [continued]

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Hyena Lurks in the Shadows

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Jeffrey Means led Sound Icon Friday at the ICA under the auspices of  the Institute of Contemporary Art and the Boston University Center in a show which included the life story of writer and storyteller Mollena Lee Williams-Haas.   [continued]

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Perfect Little Women…or Were They?

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Mark Adamo’s evergreen Little Women, in a sold-out 4-performance run at the Booth Theater, gave two large casts and copious collaborators plenty of scope to demonstrate the thriving good health of the BU School of Music Opera Institute and School of Theater.   [continued]

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Brahms, First of the Moderns

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In Paul Rudolph’s soaring modernist sanctuary of First Church in Boston last night, we rediscovered the glorious rhapsodic beauty and innovative percussive power of Brahms’s piano music in the hands of Sergey Schepkin and the Lindsey siblings.   [continued]

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Bravo, BSO on Iconic New Work

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A knock-your-socks-off world premiere of American composer Carlos Simon’s Four Black Dances. Bloch’s early 20th-century musical narrative about King Solomon, Schelomo: Rhapsodie Hébraïque with the inspirational young cellist, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, and a rich take on Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony constituted this week’s BSO offerings   [continued]

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Steampunk Met Multiverse

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Guerilla Opera brought Elena Ruehr’s new opera to life at the Theater Arts Building W97 Black Box Theater on the MIT campus over the last weekend. Lovelace and Babbage ecounted a series of adventures filled with humor, espionage, and intrigue from the Victorian steampunk world to a multiverse.   [continued]

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Claremont Trio Does the Gardner

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The Claremont Trio’s all-19th-century program at the Gardner on Sunday afternoon started with two splendid works by women composers and concluded with Brahms’s Trio No. 1.   [continued]

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Brahms’s Famous Three Against Two

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A Far Cry’s “Unrequited,” at Jordan Hall on Friday night, paid tribute to the Brahms-Clara Schumann relationship, a bond as fraught as it was loving. Crier-violinist Megumi Lewis introduced the show which began as guest soprano Katharine Dain sang three of Clara’s Lieder to accompaniments which Crier Rafael Popper-Keizer derived.   [continued]

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BSO Does Justice to Wagner in Concert

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Andris Nelsons led the BSO through a unforgettable traversal of excerpts from Wagner’s Tannhäuser on Thursday night. Soloits Amber Wagner, soprano; mezzo-soprano Marina Prudenskaya; Klaus Florian Vogt, tenor and  Christian Gerhaher, baritone fronted the BSO and the TFC Thursday night. Repeats tonight. Don’t miss it.   [continued]

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