Month: March 2017

New Release: Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, John Eliot Gardiner

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Each time we explore Bach’s music we feel as if we have traveled great distances to, and through, a remote but entrancing soundscape. -Sir John Eliot Gardiner An exciting new recording of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion was released last Friday. Sir John Eliot Gardiner leads the Monteverdi Choir (an ensemble he founded in 1964), the Trinity Boys Choir, the English Baroque Soloists, and a cast which includes James Gilchrist as the Evangelist and Stephan Loges as Jesus. The …

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Anne-Sophie Mutter Plays Takemitsu

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At the end of April, German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter will be appearing with conductor Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony. The program will pair the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with an exciting lesser-known work: Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu’s Nostalghia for solo violin and orchestra, written in 1987 in memory of the Russian film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky. Takemitsu was inspired by Tarkovsky’s use of wide, long, gradually unfolding landscape shots. Here is what Mutter said about the piece in a Huffington …

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New Release: Jan Lisiecki’s “Chopin: Works for Piano and Orchestra”

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The newest album of 21-year-old Canadian pianist Jan Lisiecki comes out today. Lisiecki is joined by the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester and Polish conductor Krzysztof Urbański for Chopin: Works for Piano and Orchestra. (Watch the trailer here). This marks Lisiecki’s fifth Deutsche Grammophon release. The recording moves beyond Chopin’s two concertos (which Lisiecki recorded in 2009) to an assortment of the composer’s smaller works for piano and orchestra: Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise Brillante in G Major/E-Flat Major, Op. 22, Variations on …

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Barber’s Second Essay: Mid-Century American Romanticism

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Samuel Barber (1910-1981) composed his first piece, a 23-measure piano composition in C minor called Sadness, at the age of seven. At the age of nine he wrote this precocious letter: Dear Mother: I have written this to tell you my worrying secret. Now don’t cry when you read it because it is neither yours nor my fault. I suppose I will have to tell it now without any nonsense. To begin with I …

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Barbara Bonney: Samuel Barber’s Four Songs, Op. 13

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Think twentieth-century music and what comes to mind? Probably the atonal serialism of Arnold Schoenberg, Elliott Carter, Milton Babbitt, or Karlheinz Stockhausen, along with the witty, neoclassical utterances of Stravinsky. But we should never forget that twentieth-century music is also the distinctive, Neo-Romantic voice of American composer Samuel Barber (1910-1981). Perhaps no composer in the twentieth century contributed to the genre of the art song more profoundly than Barber, who seems to have inherited the …

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Brahms Sextets: The Cypress Quartet’s Swan Song

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The San Francisco-based Cypress String Quartet disbanded last summer after twenty years. Their final recording, featuring Johannes Brahms’ two String Sextets, was released in January. The Cypress was joined by cellist Zuill Bailey and violist Barry Shiffman for the album, recorded in front of a live audience at the Skywalker Sound Studio. Recently, the Cypress Quartet’s cellist, Jennifer Kloetzel, sat down with Richmond Public Radio’s Mike Goldberg to talk about the recording. Here is …

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Happy Birthday, Frédéric Chopin

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The Polish virtuoso pianist and composer Frédéric Chopin was born on this day in 1810. Chopin was a composer who wrote, almost exclusively, for the piano. His stylistic and harmonic innovations influenced later Romantic composers. Additionally, his music has been associated with Polish nationalism. In 1939, as Nazi troops advanced on Warsaw, Chopin’s music was played continuously on Polish radio. In a recent post, I offered a few thoughts on Chopin’s Second Piano …

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