Jonathan Blumhofer
The concert, which along with the Elgar Violin Concerto also includes Rossini’s William Tell Overture and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, promises to be a momentous occasion for the ensemble.
Now in its 18th season, the membership of the Worcester Chamber Music Society has remained remarkably consistent, boasting a number of familiar faces from Boston’s chamber music and orchestral scenes.
Reviews of Hélène Grimaud’s latest homage to Clara Schumann and La Tempête investigates seeming stylistic overlaps in the music of J. S. Bach, Henryk Górecki, Jehan Alain, Knut Nystedt, and John Adams.
A charming rendition of Ravel serves as a perfect foil to the rigors of the Schoenberg, which, tough nut though it remains, here gets just the sort of devoted advocacy it requires.
This is a Tchaikovsky Fifth that’s thoroughly lived in.
The album is a welcome appendix to the conductor’s admirable symphonic cycle with this orchestra, as well as a timely reminder of Vaughan Williams’ compositional range.
A three-movement concerto for violin and orchestra, “Dependent Arising” fuses the worlds of heavy metal, punk rock, and 20th-century classical composition into a furious, frenetic, sometimes tortured thirty-minute whole.
Ultimately, then, we’ve got something special here: a fresh take on some canonic works by a conductor and soloist whose bread-and-butter is this very fare.
Move over, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, and Bartók: the pantheon of great Third Piano Concertos is growing.
Commentary: Brandeis University Axes the Arts
Gutting a venerable department – particularly a world-renowned one that, by all accounts, delivers – in the name of belt-tightening is shortsighted and foolish.
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