The Rite is receiving many performances this season, one of them this past weekend by the Auburn Symphony Orchestra at that city’s Performing Arts Center. For this concert, conductor Stewart Kershaw coupled it with Richard Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration, a tone poem on essentially the same theme, composed some 22 years earlier. Continue reading Auburn Symphony’s Springtime “Rite,” With Strauss on the Side
Handel’s cantata Apollo e Dafne is an opera in miniature, with emotions as sharply delineated as you’d find in Puccini’s Tosca but in a fraction of the time. Continue reading At Pacific MusicWorks, a Greek God Turned Frustrated Stalker
By the time the second half of the concert began, the large audience was able to identify which variation had the bulldog sliding down a steep slope into the fast running river and splashing his way out; which described the thunderstorm Elgar and another friend got caught in on a walk; which the high pitched giggle of one friend or the rather gloomy outlook of another. Continue reading Deconstructing Elgar’s “Enigma” at Seattle Symphony. Solving it? No.
Starting with an aggressively forceful start and very fast, Lim’s playing insistently reminded the listener that the piano is a percussion instrument. This impression came back many times during the performance, but in between she created a beautiful tone with a sensitive touch, particularly during the second movement. Continue reading HJ Lim Drops the Hammers on Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto
Ten strong voices, using no vibrato and with a resonance and slightly nasal sound which comes from using the whole skull as resonating chamber, sang the entire Vespers in just under two hours without intermission, processing around the cathedral and singing from different locations. Continue reading Cappella Romana Fill St. James Cathedral with Devotion to Ancient Vespers
While these two concertos are familiar to many, the incidental music Purcell wrote for plays is mostly less so. The group of airs and dances for The Gordian Knot Unty’d are delightful, particularly towards the end, when the audience heard a familiar tune, “Rockabye, baby,” in increasingly sophisticated and developed guise. Continue reading Seattle Baroque Orchestra, from Bach Concertos to Purcell Hornpipes
All three works—the original version of Mussorgsky’s A Night on Bald Mountain, the Tchaikovsky and Sibelius’ Symphony No. 1—were completed within 22 years of each other towards the end of the 19th century, two from Russia, one from its near neighbor, Finland. Continue reading Seattle Symphony Plays Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius
