Music
By Caldwell Titcomb Dec. 1: The Tufts Early Music Ensemble, including singers and instrumentalists, will present a free concert of secular music by the great 15th-century composer Guillaume Dufay and his contemporaries, whom we rarely get to hear in live performance. Distler Performance Hall, Granoff Music Center, Tufts University, 8 p.m.
Read MoreBy Caldwell Titcomb The Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) began its season in Jordan Hall on November 13 with an unusual and enthralling concert that it advertised as a “Big Bang” event. In all three works on the program the emphasis was on a huge assortment of percussion instruments both familiar and exotic.
Read MoreBy Caldwell Titcomb The Boston Lyric Opera (BLO) is currently offering Georges Bizet’s “Carmen,” his last completed and finest opera, which had its delayed and unsuccessful premiere in 1875. According to Opera America, “Carmen” ranks No. 4 in the list of most performed works from the 1880s to 2005, surpassed only by Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly”…
Read MoreBy Caldwell Titcomb Argentinian pianist Ingrid Fliter made her Boston debut with a Celebrity Series recital in Jordan Hall on November 1. Now 36, she started playing in public at the age of eleven. For this appearance she offered music by Beethoven, Chopin, and Schumann.
Read MoreBy Caldwell Titcomb Four youngish players, trained at the Juilliard School of Music, constituted themselves as the Chiara String Quartet. For several years they have held artist residency at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. They have received a number of awards and prizes, and this season they are the Blodgett Artists-in-Residence at Harvard University, where they…
Read MoreBy Caldwell Titcomb Nov 1: Dinosaur Annex celebrates the 80th birthday of composer Yehudi Wyner with two of his works, plus music by David Liptak, Stefan Hakenberg & others. Wyner will himself perform. Goethe-Institut Boston, 170 Beacon Street, Boston, at 7:30 p.m. (Talk with composers at 6:30 p.m.)
Read MoreBy Caldwell Titcomb You might not be aware of it, but the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra (HRO) is the oldest symphony orchestra in the country, having begun as the Pierian Sodality in 1808. For the past 45 years, the group was led by composer-conductor James Yannatos, who retired last June. So the HRO on October 24 gave…
Read MoreBy Helen Epstein Oct-8-13 Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich Symphony Hall Boston, MA Vasily Petrenko, conductor Audiences as well as composers project their emotions and fantasies onto every piece of art with which they engage, but I think this is particularly true of instrumental music, whose non-verbal, non-visual yet powerfully emotional expressiveness is as open to…
Read MoreBy Caldwell Titcomb Three works by major composers made up the free concert presented by the Boston Conservatory Wind Ensemble on October 10 at the Midway Studios in South Boston. On the podium was Eric Hewitt, who holds a bachelor’s in saxophone performance and a master’s in conducting – both from the New England Conservatory…
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