Music
Sultan has a solid lock on my year-end best of 2022 list. Let’s make the world a little smaller and make this album a hit.
Guitarist Eddie Condon quotes a mobster on jazz: “…it’s got guts and it don’t make you slobber.”
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.
To some degree, everything fit under the resilient umbrella that the late George Wein raised at the edge of Newport Harbor.
The Stone Age is only about the gossip, to the point where even when something (potentially) true comes along, it still reads like trash.
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.
The Newport Folk Festival’s biggest secrets were cleanly hidden and tightly executed with the day-capping revelations of Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell.
Such a beautiful evening of music — two relatively concise sets, one an hour long, another a little less — adding up to an integral whole.
Arts Commentary: In Memoriam, Michael Tilson Thomas (1944-2026)