Music
Chicago singer-songwriter and pianist Neal Francis has been riding a smooth retro groove since the late 2010s, thanks to his stellar fusion of funk, soul, R&B, and psychedelic rock.
Here’s hoping that Adam Sherman and Robin Lane remain a creative item and continue to write and record new material. Both are in late-career resurgences and have devoted fans that fill the smaller clubs they typically perform in to the brim.
“When I think about blues music, I think about the musicians that came before me and what they had to say, all of those amazing guitar players. They were really playing a form of protest music.”
A pair of pleasant traversals of the French master’s complete piano music, or thereabout, from the still-relative-newcomer Seong-Jin Cho and the established Jean-Efflam Bavouzet.
Violinist James Ehnes and the BBC Philharmonic supply some truly great performances; violinist Benjamin Schmid revels in composer Friedrich Gulda’s freewheeling sense of play.
Semyon Bychkov supplies an extraordinarily well-played account of Mahler’s Third; Paavo Järvi’s version of Mahler’s Fifth avoids the more idiosyncratic excesses of Leonard Bernstein’s superb 1987 Vienna recording.
Violinist Ray Chen and the BSO delivered one of the most seismic performances of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto that I’ve heard.
Wes Montgomery and Joe Pass are master jazz guitarists who sound nothing alike.
Anybody at Tuesday’s show who thought the members of Kraftwerk were just punching buttons at their static posts while audiovisuals surged automatically would be mistaken.
Navigating the clash between tradition and experimentation — they are often two vastly different artistic worlds — requires bold programming.
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