Music
“When you play with authority, then that’s what the music is about, like ooooh baby, and sing it.” — Cecil Taylor
Tenor Mathias Vidal shines, as does the period-instrument orchestra, in the rarely heard, trimmer version of 1761, on the Chateau’s own new award-winning label.
Music Review: “Someone/Anyone? A 50th Anniversary Tribute to Todd Rundgren’s Something/Anything?”
Someone/Anyone? is packed with lots of great music and makes a strong complement to the album it compliments, Something/Anything?
Unlike musicians who operate on the surface and create a beautiful veneer, pianist Lennie Tristano’s music asks harder questions.
Edward Loder’s well-crafted Raymond and Agnes (1855) captures much of the eerie glow of its Gothic model, Matthew Lewis’s once scandalous novel, The Monk.
Temptations 60 celebrates the band’s 60th anniversary, and it strikes a careful balance between looking backward and staying grounded in the here-and-now.
The format may be different, but FKA twigs remains as hypnotic as ever on her album Caprisongs.
Opera Review: Arabs on the Operatic Stage — Meyerbeer’s 1814 Comic Opera about the Mysterious ‘East’
Long before the often-prejudicial portrayals of Middle Easterners in Hollywood films, opera composers crafted insightful works from 1001 Nights.
Unlike a lot of modern jazz releases, this isn’t so much about displaying virtuosity (though all the musicians are virtuosos) as it is about setting a mood and a groove and dancing on top of it.
CD recordings keep bringing us unexpected treasures, including chamber works by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Samuel Adler, and the (by turns) exquisite and powerful opera Armida by Mozart’s contemporary — who was not his murderer — Antonio Salieri.
Fest Review: IFFBoston Shorts — Part One