Classical Music
This was ensemble playing by two people who knew not only the music, but each other completely. There are some things you can’t fake, and one is ensemble playing with a person — or people — you love. (I speak from experience here). Everything was perfect.
July is a month when most of the great classical music is happening in pastoral settings and festivals around New England and far from Boston.
BEMF is, quite simply, paradise for those who love early music, and they seem to be a different audience than those who show up for, say, the Boston Symphony or any of the excellent chamber music groups around town.
For decades, Mr. Hamelin was known for his forbiddingly fabulous technique deployed to play and record vast swaths of immensely difficult and arcane repertoire that most pianists had rarely touched or even known of. Then, the past few years, he ventured into the standard repertoire with astonishing results.
The Boston Early Music Festival is THE place for performers to be heard. And there are enough good programs, between the big Jordan Hall concerts, the two operas, a Family Day program, the mini-festivals for organ and keyboard, fringe concerts at at odd hours of the day and late night, for everyone.
“People often ask what is the biggest change in the arts in Boston over 30 years, and it all has to do with technology. Diminished funding, economic downturns, and 9/11 all changed things. But what’s really driven change is technology.”
The month’s international highlights include the Boston Modern Orchestra taking on the music of India, The Cantata Singers finishing up their homage to British composer Ralph Vaughn Williams, and Musica Sacra performing Flemish Choral Music of the High Renaissance. By Susan Miron. Sunday, May 1 @ 1:30 p.m. at MassArt’s Pozen Hall, Boston, MA. The…
The audience went wild; Chopin’s Ballades do that to people. Cheering broke out after Dubravka Tomsic played the second ballade, and by the fourth, which starts out quietly like a lullaby and builds up to an all-out, rhapsodic, virtuosic tour de force, the entire audience seemed smitten. Dubravka Tomsic. Presented by the Celebrity Series at…
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