Classical Music
We’re not saying get rid of “Madama Butterfly” We’re saying do a better Butterfly.
The arrangements seem to emerge organically from the structure and feel of the compositions and harmonies, like leaves unfolding from the stem of an exotic plant.
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.
Randall Goosby’s sophomore album proves that the violinist is the real deal.
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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