Monday, October 24, 2016
Weaving together the strands of a full opera in a concert setting has to be one of the biggest challenges around for presenters and audiences. Over the past year the Washington area has seen…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:29PMMonday, June 13, 2016
The Czech Republic is a small country with a big impact on music. It’s a good thing they don’t just churn out mere virtuosos, of whom the world has plenty. Instead the best of the lot ha…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:21AMThursday, June 9, 2016
Serendipity counts in music as in anything else. A year and a half ago I recommended two outstanding debut albums by artists with local connections. Soprano Danielle Talamantes, a Northern V…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:19AMFriday, May 27, 2016
Here’s an idea: Let’s change the name of Bach’s Mass in B Minor to the Mass in D Major. Just because convention calls for a piece to be named after its beginning key doesn’t mean tha…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:54PMFriday, April 8, 2016
The Music Room at the Phillips Collection is such a distinctive and up-close venue to hear performers that you can forget how momentous the events there can turn out to be. That may well hav…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:16PMTuesday, March 15, 2016
Who needs to skip around musical history in a concert? A hundred years ago the musical world was in ferment, with shocking new developments right before and after World War I. The Montreal S…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:20PMWednesday, March 9, 2016
When Andrew Lloyd Webber recently told a group of teenage rock musicians on Broadway that he wanted to talk about the music of Sergei Prokofiev rather than his own musicals, he was the lates…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:52PMTuesday, March 1, 2016
The musical imagery of the material presented by Washington’s Russian Chamber Art Society is so distinctive that its substantial audiences actually crave the work that goes into listening …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:58PMIf there is a spiritual content to music – music by itself, no lyrics, just abstract sound – then many listeners down through history have claimed to hear it in the final works of great …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:50PMMonday, February 29, 2016
Given a choice between the intellectual and the emotional, most concert-goers, in their heart of hearts, will want to hear something that moves them. They got their wish on Sunday afternoon …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:27PMMonday, January 11, 2016
Songs you’ve never heard of in a foreign language you rarely hear, performed by two artists who started rehearsing them two days earlier. What kind of a formula for success is that? This k…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 07:34PMWednesday, January 6, 2016
They say the show must go on, and a set of unusual circumstances is bringing together two of Washington’s most distinctive classical performers this Saturday evening for a special concert …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:46PMFriday, December 18, 2015
The Barber of Seville turns 200 years old in two months. Performing it in English translation works best when it helps show American audiences how similar the elements of effective comedy ar…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:48PMWednesday, December 9, 2015
Composers wrote great ballet and opera music for two reasons. The first was to help dancers and singers to portray characters and tell their stories. The second was to have the music led in …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:16AMMonday, November 23, 2015
The predominance of voice in the operatic tradition usually doesn’t change the need for effective staging to put the full point across. Washington Concert Opera showcased at least one exce…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:36PMSunday, November 22, 2015
Cellist Amit Peled is one of those practitioners of “serious” music who brings a kind of pizzazz that’s probably needed in the 21st century world of what’s generically dubbed classi…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:29PMFriday, November 20, 2015
The National Symphony Orchestra is doing one of its best guest conductors, Jiri Belohlavek, mostly proud this week with music from his Czech homeland. In the first of its three concerts this…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:39PMThursday, November 19, 2015
The operas of early 19th century master Gioachino Rossini play a big part in the life of The artistic director of Washington Concert Opera is preparing for the company’s performance this …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:00PMThursday, November 12, 2015
Dreamy music about the memories of childhood and a virtuoso spin through the themes of one of history’s greatest operas are the stuff of which great piano recitals are made. But it’s a m…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:12PMIf you believe that a good way to judge music is on whether it sounds good and moves you, then you have a friend in international concert pianist Olga Kern. The Russian-bred, New York-based …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:06PMTuesday, November 3, 2015
Somebody must have rung a bell and instructed judges at all international music competitions to start awarding prizes to young classical musicians who already demonstrate daring and panache,…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:34AMTuesday, October 13, 2015
What better place to celebrate the life and work of Marvin Hamlisch than right here in Washington? But the reasons for An Evening with the Music of Marvin Hamlisch on Monday, October 19, 2…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:50AMThursday, October 8, 2015
Hearing the rising Ukrainian violinist Aleksey Semenenko perform is like a visit to a musical laboratory. At age 25, the monstrously talented Mr. Semenenko is still exploring various approac…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:50AMTuesday, October 6, 2015
Mainstream classical music commentary in Washington often complains about an over-reliance on the symphonies and concertos of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff for the programming at the area’s…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 07:00PMMonday, October 5, 2015
Artistic risk-taking in Washington extends across many genres to numerous performing groups. The region’s vocal music scene certainly got a flavor of that on Saturday night in a one-time c…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:19PMFriday, September 18, 2015
Russian pianist Olga Kern is something of a cult figure because of her landmark victory in the 2001 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth, captured in one of the greatest…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:41PMMonday, September 14, 2015
Summer music festivals in both the pop and classical music worlds can come with a lot of flash and dash. But not to be overlooked in our region is a more modest gem tacked onto the end of fe…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:03PMTuesday, June 23, 2015
It must be time for dessert! Two new recordings by prominent local classical artists coincidentally use the metaphor of desserts-after-a-meal in their concepts. They both provide delightful …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:19AMFriday, June 12, 2015
The musical inventiveness and dramatic craziness of one of LL’s most challenging pieces of all, his 1956 musical Candide, must flow right through Marin Alsop’s veins. The music director …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:09AMThursday, June 4, 2015
If you want to call Richard Glazier a throwback, go right ahead. He loves it. For Glazier, there’s nothing better than sitting at a piano telling stories about George and Ira Gershwin and …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:05PMWednesday, May 13, 2015
Franz Schubert’s Piano Sonata No. 19 in C minor is a sprawling, at times even rambling composition that takes a full half hour to spin out. Not even one of the world’s greatest living pi…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:25PM 
