Celebrity-Series
At this point, violinist Xiang Yu sounds like a mature artist ready to commence a major career.
Tenor Nicholas Phan and pianist Myra Huang are a superb duo, and the pair’s recital was easily one of the highlights of this year’s concert season.
February feels like the ‘New November’: concerts of real interest during the weekdays and too many great concerts during the weekends.
After intermission, Mr. Lang closed the concert with Frederic Chopin’s Twelve Etudes (Op. 25). This is music in which Mr. Lang is completely in his element, and his performance of these fearsomely difficult pieces was a marvel of extraordinary technical skill.
Audra McDonald is so popular on stage, in concert, and on television that she has become, to many, a one-name goddess like Bette, Judy, and Barbra. Judging from her recent star turn in the American Repertory Theater’s production of “Porgy and Bess” and this brilliant concert, she can give the other One-Named Ones a run for their money.
The audience went wild; Chopin’s Ballades do that to people. Cheering broke out after Dubravka Tomsic played the second ballade, and by the fourth, which starts out quietly like a lullaby and builds up to an all-out, rhapsodic, virtuosic tour de force, the entire audience seemed smitten. Dubravka Tomsic. Presented by the Celebrity Series at…
Once he managed to get his recalcitrant instrument in tune, guitarist John Williams played each piece with great mastery. One might not remember the names of the composers or even what each composition sounded like, but no one will forget the sheet beauty of his guitar playing
The world of tenors has expanded exponentially, it would seem, since the days when Luciano Pavoratti and Placido Domingo dominated the big tenor roles and the attention of the media and opera-loving public. Domingo, astonishingly, is still singing brilliantly, conducting, and running an opera company, but recently there have been a good half dozen excellent youngish tenors singing at the Met, including the fabulously gifted lyric tenor Matthew Polenzani.
Fuse Commentary: 2013-1014 Orchestral Season Preview
So, even though certain pieces by Mendelssohn and Beethoven seem to be turning up with greater frequency than perhaps may be healthy, there is still much to admire and look forward to in the upcoming orchestral season.
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