Review
This volume is clearly critic Nate Chinen’s resounding response to the “jazz is dead” chant.
The Tallis Scholars are unquestionably today’s most renowned exponent of Renaissance sacred music.
The company’s staging is dynamic and vivacious, and the unconventional seating arrangements give audience members the chance to place themselves in the center of the action.
None of the opera recordings I have reviewed this past year beats this Cradle for dramatic vitality, musical imagination, and ongoing political relevance.
The success or failure of this show rests primarily on the physical presence, voice and acting of the actor playing the celebrated lyric tenor Roland Hayes.
Acclaimed playwright and screenwriter Michael Cristofer’s script is very open about portraying Emile Griffith’s sexuality.
Handel & Haydn Society’s Haydn and Mozart is about as good as it gets; Martyn Brabbins’ recording of A Sea Symphony is one of the year’s best releases; and for elegance and technical command, you can’t go wrong with Tilson Thomas and his San Francisco Symphony.
When Vermont’s Mountain Man brings us its Appalachian vocal stylings the trio is venturing into the hollers of both the Green and the Blue Ridge Mountains.
This blistering new documentary manages to offer a fairly balanced portrait of a man who, at the end of his life, was widely demonized.
Pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet delivers some fine Mozart; conductor Hannu Lintu brings rhythmic energy and textural transparency to the music of Witold Lutoslawski; Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony Orchestra don’t do right by Berlioz.
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