A Snapshot of Janacek with Jessica Lee

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This week, the Cleveland Orchestra announced that Korean-American violinist Jessica Lee has been appointed assistant concertmaster (the fourth chair). Lee is a native of my adopted hometown, Richmond, Virginia. Although our paths never crossed (she left before I arrived in 2002), many of my Richmond Symphony colleagues remember her fondly. A graduate of Juilliard and Curtis, Jessica Lee has been a long-time member of the Johannes String Quartet. (You can see her in action …

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Mark Kaplan’s Solo Bach Recording

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If you’re looking for rare treasures in the form of recent classical music releases, try hanging around your local classical radio host. A few days ago, as the announcers at my local public radio station were clearing their archives of duplicate promotional recordings, I ran across Mark Kaplan’s March release of J.S. Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin on the Bridge Records label. Compare this recording to the equally wonderful period …

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Common Tones in Simple Time: John Adams’ Gradually Shifting Sonic Landscape

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Something really interesting happens to your perception of time, space, and motion when you listen to John Adams’ Common Tones in Simple Time. It’s music which is cinematic and topographical. One critic likened it to the experience of “flying or gliding over a landscape of gently changing colors and textures.” The composer Nico Muhly called it, “distinctly American music: the music of the cross-country road trip, the slowly changing landscape above the quickly moving pavement.”  Muhly’s last …

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Ned Rorem’s “Little Elegy”

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It’s amazing how much can be said in the small space of sixteen measures. A case in point is Little Elegy, a song by American composer Ned Rorem (b. 1923). Rorem, who was born in Richmond, Indiana and will turn 93 in October, produced a series of operas, three symphonies, countless concertos, and chamber works over the course of his long career. But he’s most known for his prolific contribution to a genre …

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Mozart’s “Haffner” Symphony: Music of Celebration

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A new commission was the last thing the 26-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wanted in the summer of 1782. He had just moved to the musical mecca of Vienna, shaking off the provincialism of his native Salzburg and its “coarse, slovenly, dissolute court musicians.” In addition to a busy teaching and composition schedule, he was getting ready to move to a new house in preparation for his marriage to Constanze Weber. But in July, 1782, …

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A Snapshot of Figaro

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Last month we listened to an excerpt from Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s great new live concert recording of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. Here are a few more highlights from that recording. Almost all of Mozart’s music grows out of opera. Passages from the symphonies and concertos can be heard as wordless arias and duets. It’s as if Mozart couldn’t shut off the stream of characters and vague hints of far-off dramatic …

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New Release: Maya Beiser’s TranceClassical

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The sounds of the twenty-first century are largely electronic and computer processed. In this environment, a recording can become a work of art in its own right, not just a feeble attempt to recreate a live concert experience. I was reminded of this over the past few days as I sampled cellist Maya Beiser’s newly-released album, TranceClassical. Beiser, an Israeli-born American (her mother is French and her father is Argentine) who graduated from Yale …

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