Classical Music
This is a release that showcases many of Andris Nelsons’ strengths, including his strong sensitivity for instrumental colors, blends, and balances. At the same time, it also demonstrates the conductor’s hit-or-miss nature with the core repertoire.
I was pleased to encounter all three compact operas. Lennox Berkeley seems to me more and more an admirable, indeed lovable composer, and a bit of a chameleon. I like him in all his various colors.
New recordings serve up fine performances of music from Latin America, Brazil, and post-1918 England. And a novel sends its main character back two centuries into Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro.
American-ness in music is impossible to define and constantly in flux, yet the threads that connect it all together – at once beautiful, tragic, humorous, ironic, whimsical – are all somehow recognizable.
Taken together, this is a release that showcases both the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and its chief conductor – as well as their repertoire choices – in a brilliant light.
Thankfully, there is no melodramatic black-and-white in James Kallembach’s fascinating 36-minute work, first performed at Boston University by the Lorelei Ensemble in 2017.
This “serenata” (or chamber opera) with characters from Graeco-Roman mythology receives an elegant world-premiere recording that may bring a major composer out from the shadows.
Moissey Vainberg’s opera powerfully evokes the brutality of Hitler’s extermination camps and the moral ambiguity of postwar Germany.
We’ve got ourselves another winner in this ongoing Pittsburgh/Beethoven series. Warmly recommended.
I am honestly puzzled by the casualness or, at times, ferocity with which some people nowadays reject classical music as inherently narrow or elitist.
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