Classical Music
The tremendous success and rave reviews elicited by this “Orfeo” are due in large part to Boston Early Music Festival’s superb orchestra and cast of eight singers.
Where does such musical maturity and – let’s face it – genius come from? Pianist George Li’s phrasing, the beauty of his sound, his perfect pedaling and expressive rhythm – all were in play.
Coro Allegro successfully delivered the joy, grief, and nostalgia inherent in each of these complex vocal works.
The Takács Quartet have won the kind of acclaim that most chamber groups can only dream of, and their concert in Boston made their enviable reputation understandable.
Why, Rita Costanzi asks incredulously, do harpists, albeit occasionally, marry other harpists: “Does the word masochist mean anything to you?”
With “In Seven Days,” Thomas Adés seems to have developed a musical language that’s complex yet not forbidding: there’s no sense that his music is weighed down by expectations of the past, even as he freely refers to archaic compositional forms.
Teams of string coaches were deployed to make this quartet of actors look like they knew what they are doing with their instruments, but no critic has noticed how completely unrelated the motions of their left hands — finger placement and vibrato — are to the music that is played, with the exception of Christopher Walken, who looks like he is playing his cello correctly and producing real music.
Handel & Haydn Society captured all of this and then some with a vigorous, focused performance that was a marvel of controlled fury.
Saariaho’s music is often lush and vibrant, to be sure, but it also can lose track of its musical purpose and meander excessively from time to time. Not so in “Circle Map.”
Considered by some to be a guardian of ancient music, Jordi Savall has inspired adulation for a variety of reasons, but in the end it’s because he plays the viol or viola da gamba better than just about anyone else alive.
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