Music
A major contribution to the recorded repertory, making clear just how effective Saint-Saëns’s The Yellow Princess could be on stage, its nowadays objectionable title repudiated by its varied and nuanced approach to the evocation of the exotic.
Jean-Michel Pilc is a talented pianist who expresses his happiness at just being alive via performances that treat the most revered standards in a manner that is wholly personal, even idiosyncratic — yet memorable.
This cooperative music is deliberately international in instrumentation and personnel and theme, proffering its own characteristic, and often quite beautiful, mix of sounds.
Jazz Concert and Album Review: Vincent Peirani and Emile Parisien — Bringing Culture to the Colonies
The communication between Vincent Peirani’s accordion and Emile Parisien’s soprano sax was effortless, empathetic, and flawless.
I am beginning to suspect that Franz Schreker was the most effective of the many semi-forgotten opera composers who were active in the German lands during the first decades of the twentieth century (that is, ones less well known today than Strauss, Berg, and Kurt Weill).
All three are singer/songwriters whose individual gifts mesh seamlessly with soaring harmonies and a like-minded empathetic view of the world.
This is free jazz perhaps, but it never sounds frantic, wild, or abandoned.
Marvelously accomplished albums from American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato and Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan.
Two first-rate albums: pianist Lara Downes successfully reconsiders Scott Joplin and the New York Youth Symphony plays Florence Price and others with panache.
Music Commentary: Jean Sibelius’s Violin Concerto — The Universal Concerto?
Sibelius’s Violin Concerto is almost something of a phenomenon now: in just eight months, I’ve heard it played by three different fiddlers — Baiba Skride, Lisa Batiashvili, and Inmo Yang.
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