Music

Concert Review: The High Standards of Michael Formanek’s Elusion Quartet

September 16, 2022
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To hear free music so beautifully contained and expressed in such inventive forms isn’t unheard of (Henry Threadgill? Vijay Iyer? Wadada Leo Smith?). But bassist Michael Formanek has his own way.

Book Review: Steve Reich’s “Conversations” — Something Special

September 15, 2022
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At its best, Steve Reich’s Conversations is illuminating and engaging, an honest discussion of the creative process by one of the major composers of our times.

Book Review: “Let’s Do It: The Birth of Pop Music: A History” — An Enlightening Learning Experience

September 14, 2022
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A lot of history is jammed into this book, but the author manages to ruminate in an informative and engrossing way on 50-plus years of pop music.

Opera Album Review: An Opera by a Scandalous — and Murdered — Composer Is Brought Back to Life

September 12, 2022
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Alessandro Stradella’s Loving and Pretending (caa. 1676) gets a lively, precise, and characterful performance in this world-premiere recording.

Opera Preview: A Rachmaninoff Triple-Header!

September 11, 2022
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Odyssey Opera, and major singers from Ukraine and Russia, bring the great Russian composers’s three one-act operas to Jordan Hall on Sunday, September 25.

Concert Review: Van Morrison — Engaged Rather than Grumpy

September 7, 2022
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A relatively short-but-sweet night that struck just enough highs and no real lows – as long as one accepts that Van Morrison gives more heed to covers than his own hits.

Jazz Retrospective: The Indelible Impact of “Emergency!” by the Tony Williams Lifetime

September 6, 2022
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If you don’t know those 1969 originals, get them and listen to them. And if you know the recordings well, listen to them again. No matter how familiar this 50-year-old music is to you, you’ll be struck by its timelessness.

Jazz Album Review: Tony Williams’s “Play or Die” Gets Full Release, 40 Years On

September 5, 2022
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The shadow of Weather Report looms over this groove session of consonant harmonies, the only documentation of a short-lived band that should have had the chance to burn more brightly.

Opera Review: Saint-Saëns’s “Phryné” — Short and Witty, and Rediscovered

September 1, 2022
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A one-hour opera that the world forgot — a world-premiere recording of Saint-Saëns’s Phryné.

Rock Album Review: Superorganism’s “World Wide Pop” — The Power of Collective Eccentricity

September 1, 2022
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In World Wide Pop, the London pop collective looks for peace in the digital cosmos, despite intimations of coming oblivion.

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