Caldwell-Titcomb
By Caldwell Titcomb The Cantata Singers, founded in 1964, has for 27 years had David Hoose as its Music Director. This year Hoose chose Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672) as the composer to be featured in all four of the season’s concerts. There were numerous fine composers working in the seventeeth century, but Schütz is the greatest…
Read MoreBy Caldwell Titcomb Jordan Hall in Boston was filled to capacity for the January 8 Celebrity Series recital by pianist Emanuel Ax. Now 60 years old, he has long harbored a reputation as a serious and thoughtful musician.
Read MoreBy Caldwell Titcomb Jan. 6,7,8,9,12: The Boston Symphony is led by Ton Koopman (b. 1944), Dutch keyboardist, conductor, and specialist in early music, knighted in 2003 in the Netherlands. With a bow to Haydn, the bicentennial of whose death occurred in 2009, there are two works: Symphony No. 98 in B-flat Major (1792), and Cello…
Read MoreBy Caldwell Titcomb Courtesy of the Celebrity Series, the Emerson String Quartet, founded in our country’s bicentennial year of 1976, was in town for a Jordan Hall concert on December 4. Since the founding cellist and viola player served only briefly, the current members – Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer, violins; Lawrence Dutton, viola; David…
Read MoreLeonard Bernstein was the most charismatic conductor of the last century. Gustavo Dudamel is the most charismatic of this one – and is likely to remain so for a long time to come. By Caldwell Titcomb In the arena of classical music, the world’s most exciting personage continues to be Gustavo Dudamel, the dynamo from…
Read MoreBy Caldwell Titcomb Dec. 1: The Tufts Early Music Ensemble, including singers and instrumentalists, will present a free concert of secular music by the great 15th-century composer Guillaume Dufay and his contemporaries, whom we rarely get to hear in live performance. Distler Performance Hall, Granoff Music Center, Tufts University, 8 p.m.
Read MoreRomeo and Juliet and Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare, in repertory at the Gamm Theatre, Pawtucket, Rhode Island, November 25 through December 5, 2009. Reviewed by Caldwell Titcomb To celebrate the start of its 25th season, the Gamm Theatre in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, is offering two Shakespeare plays in repertory: “Romeo and Juliet”…
Read MoreBy Caldwell Titcomb The Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) began its season in Jordan Hall on November 13 with an unusual and enthralling concert that it advertised as a “Big Bang” event. In all three works on the program the emphasis was on a huge assortment of percussion instruments both familiar and exotic.
Read MoreBy Caldwell Titcomb The Boston Lyric Opera (BLO) is currently offering Georges Bizet’s “Carmen,” his last completed and finest opera, which had its delayed and unsuccessful premiere in 1875. According to Opera America, “Carmen” ranks No. 4 in the list of most performed works from the 1880s to 2005, surpassed only by Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly”…
Read MoreBeyond the Golden Door: Jewish American Drama and Jewish American Experience by Julius Novick. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; paperback 2009, 200 pages. Reviewed by Caldwell Titcomb The Jewish presence in the United States goes back to the16th century. In 1584 Sir Walter Raleigh recruited the expert Prague-born Jewish metallurgist and mining engineer Joachim Gans/Gaunse to join…
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