Music
If the BSO wanted to make a statement about where it might be headed based on the strong artistic results of the current season, it certainly could have. That it didn’t is a missed opportunity and hopefully not a sign of things to come.
The tremendous success and rave reviews elicited by this “Orfeo” are due in large part to Boston Early Music Festival’s superb orchestra and cast of eight singers.
Though Peter Townshend is clearly the better known and more popular of the two, it was Mike Scott who produced the better book and more satisfying promotional event in Boston.
Where does such musical maturity and – let’s face it – genius come from? Pianist George Li’s phrasing, the beauty of his sound, his perfect pedaling and expressive rhythm – all were in play.
Coro Allegro successfully delivered the joy, grief, and nostalgia inherent in each of these complex vocal works.
The Takács Quartet have won the kind of acclaim that most chamber groups can only dream of, and their concert in Boston made their enviable reputation understandable.
Richard Vacca’s The Boston Jazz Chronicles will be a foundational document that other researchers will turn to again and again as they delve into more specific niches of Boston jazz history and unearth as yet unknown artifacts of this era and its neglected body of music.
Why, Rita Costanzi asks incredulously, do harpists, albeit occasionally, marry other harpists: “Does the word masochist mean anything to you?”
With “In Seven Days,” Thomas Adés seems to have developed a musical language that’s complex yet not forbidding: there’s no sense that his music is weighed down by expectations of the past, even as he freely refers to archaic compositional forms.
In any piece, the remarkable pianist Jason Moran might go to the very edges of the harmonic movement, until he on the verge of free jazz.
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