Jonathan Blumhofer
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.
This new recording of Charles Villiers Stanford’s”Requiem” by Martyn Brabbins, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO), and the University of Birmingham Voices, is beautiful and often memorable.
An album that does admirable justice to one of the most prolific, significant, and increasingly long-lived composers of a remarkable generation.
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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