Results tagged “classicalmusic”

This is a good week for hearing some great pianists in the area, and of all stripes and colors, too. Some good options for free concerts are listed after the jump.

In 2006, when Washington National Opera opened its American Ring Cycle, few could have imagined that it would end as it did on Saturday night, with a concert performance of Götterdämmerung. After very promising productions of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre in 2006 and 2007, financial considerations delayed the staging of Siegfried by one season, to last spring, when it ended up with a troubled casting and special-effects woes. The collapse of the financial and housing market last fall was the final nail in the coffin, forcing the company to cancel the plans to mount the entire four-opera cycle this month. By all logical expectations, this doomed Ring should have come to an ignominious end, with nothing but the fact that it finally concluded to show for all the trouble.

At the top of the agenda this week are two concerts of rarely heard Baroque music, very different from one another but both worth hearing. Many other options, including some excellent free concerts, come later.

>> We only recommend a trip to Baltimore for something extraordinary, and this week the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is not bringing a worthy program to Strathmore. Daring conductor Robert Spano, music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, will conduct two Russian fairytale scores, Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade and the suite from Stravinsky's ballet score for The Firebird. (October 29 and 30, 8 p.m.) The concert will also feature Leila Josefowicz as the soloist in John Adams's violin concerto. If you want to learn more about how Rimsky-Korsakov tells a story in music in Scheherazade, there will be a special multimedia concert attempting to show just that (October 31, 7 p.m.).

Once again this week, there are so many free concerts on the schedule that we have to begin there.

>> Of the many alluring keyboard concerts on the schedule this week, none is bigger than the next area recital of American pianist Murray Perahia, sponsored by WPAS in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall on Saturday afternoon (October 17, 4 p.m.). As I wrote of Perahia's 2007 recital at Strathmore, no real fan of the keyboard is likely to miss the opportunity to hear him play. The program includes the chance to hear one of the selections from his latest CD of Bach partitas.

It would be my guess that, of all cities in the world, Washington has the greatest number of free concerts to hear most weeks of the year. If you want to hear some good music, you have no excuse other than finding time.

October is upon us and that means one important thing for classical music lovers on a budget: the return of one of the distinctive parts of Washington's musical life, a broad offering of free concerts.

This week is the unofficial opening of the classical music season, meaning that there are finally enough fine concerts to fill this weekly agenda. In keeping with the gala spirit, most of these events are going to cost you.

Washington National Opera's production of Rossini's overexposed opera buffa The Barber of Seville was, on the surface at least, hardly an exciting way to open the Washington National Opera season. The second performance last night, however, proved that, in spite of the many deficits a company faces in making new something that is so familiar and even tired, it is definitely worth a hearing.

Yes, it is the weekend after Labor Day, and that means that your Classical Music Agenda has come back from its summer hiatus, tanned, rested, and ready. The classical music season is not yet fully under way -- but some good music is waiting to be heard, including some of it for free, which is where we begin.

Erich Kunzel, who was familiar to Washingtonians from his regular appearances at the podium of the National Symphony Orchestra Pops at annual Independence Day and Memorial Day concerts on the Capitol Lawn, died this morning near his home in Maine. He was 74.

"Nationals' Unexpected Success Sends Washington Post Into A Fugue State"

A few American orchestras have been experimenting with ways to engage the digital generation during their concerts, with interactive program notes that appear in real time through the hand-held or seat-back devices normally used for showing translations of foreign-language operas. As related by Baltimore Sun classical music critic Tim Smith over at his blog, the National Symphony Orchestra will be attempting something along those lines during its concert at Wolf Trap on July 30.

This year's Capital Fringe Festival features three chamber operas, including Michael Oberhauser's Magnum Opus, heard yesterday afternoon. This one-act chamber opera premiered in February, with a slightly different cast, at Catholic University's Benjamin T. Rome School of Music, where Oberhauser and most of the founders and performers of the small company Opera Alterna cut their teeth as students. The company's artistic director, Jay D. Brock, who directed the staging of this production, and several of the artists spoke about their work last week on WAMU's Kojo Nnamdi Show.

So few classical music concerts happen in the summer months that the weekly Classical Music Agenda gets a vacation. Here is what you could hear in the month of July, although you may have to travel a bit to get there.

June starts tomorrow, and that means that the Classical Music Agenda will soon be going on its annual summer hiatus. Already, there are fewer and fewer concerts to put on one's schedule, unless you are willing to do some traveling. If you are determined to hear some music this week, here are your choices.

Contempory composer Nicholas Maw died yesterday at the age of 73. Born in England, Maw moved to the United States after his first marriage ended in divorce, making his home in Takoma Park with Maija Hay, a ceramics artist. For much of that time he was on the faculty of Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore and had some success getting his music performed by American ensembles, including here in Washington, like the Left Bank Concert Society.

The final opera of the Washington National Opera's season opened last night, a visually lavish production of Puccini's Turandot (a full report will come tomorrow). Here are some recommendations for your listening pleasure the rest of this week, beginning with a full schedule of free concerts.

Washington National Opera continued its epic American Ring Cycle on Saturday night, opening a production of Wagner's Siegfried that was plagued by vocal and technical troubles but was still an evening of revelations.

Because of the generally conservative audiences in Washington, local ensembles tend not to program too much contemporary music, preferring to stick with familiar favorites. The Kennedy Center's CrossCurrents contemporary music festival, which opened auspiciously on Friday night with a superb concert by the Russian composer Lera Auerbach, is attempting to buck that trend. If you are the sort who complains about hearing the same old music, you are obliged to get out there and listen to something new.

The problem this week for classical music aficionados in Washington is not what to hear, but what not to hear. That is, what -- in the schedule pile-up of exceptional music -- can one afford to miss. Here are some of your choices.

A few times a year the selection of free concerts in Washington is good enough to lead this agenda, and this is one of those weeks. Here is the music you can hear this week for nothing.

With apologies for skipping the Easter edition of the Classical Music Agenda, here are a few suggestions of ways to divert your ears this weekend. One of the best organists in the world at the moment, Olivier Latry from the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, will be in town this weekend. He will perform, in an annual tradition on the Octave of Easter, at the Great Gallery Organ of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception (4th St. and Michigan Ave. NE) during two appearances on Sunday (April 19): during the noon Mass and at a 6 p.m. concert, both in the Great Upper Church and both free and open to the public. The most exciting part of Latry's performances is to hear him improvise at the organ, a skill at which he is an acknowledged master. The video embedded below gives you a taste of one of his previous improvisations, at a 1996 concert at St. Patrick's Church here in Washington.

Even though it is a holiday week, there are some excellent concerts to be heard. If you happen to be religiously inclined or can at least tolerate sitting through a religious service, this is also the week to hear lots of Renaissance polyphony and other historical music sung in resonant church spaces.

This is the last week of Washington National Opera's fine production of Peter Grimes, the modern operatic masterpiece by Benjamin Britten, which we reviewed last week. Tickets remain for performances this afternoon, as well as Wednesday and Saturday nights. For the rest of what there is to hear this week, read on.

Washington National Opera opened its first-ever production of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes on Saturday night. The house was not sold out and emptied slightly after each intermission. The operas of Britten, as analyzed in some detail by Anne Midgette in the Post, do not have the same broad appeal to listeners who prefer their opera in familiar form. This is in spite of the fact that Britten is one of the more traditionally minded opera composers of the 20th century, if you compare his operas with Berg, Messiaen, and Ligeti, for example. In fact, Grimes should be the antidote for those who dislike opera because the plots are so often absurd and sacrifice dramatic realism to musical and especially vocal excesses. Although the story is drawn from a 19th-century source, its tale of a social outcast persecuted by a closed and oppressive society was directly related to the composer's life: Benjamin Britten and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, who created the role of Grimes, were not only closeted homosexuals but committed pacifists, which made life very difficult in WWII-era Great Britain.

The Washington National Opera has come back to life for the spring half of its season, with a fine production of Britten's modern masterpiece Peter Grimes (three performances this week on March 23, 26, and 29) — see my review tomorrow for details. Here is the rest of what you might want to hear this week.

One could easily hear more than enough classical music this week for free or almost nothing: so you have no excuse not to do some listening. We'll start with some Bach and Handel -- not free -- but worth the money.

Since its formation in 1999, the Quatuor Ébène has taken the classical music world by storm, winning top prizes at the ARD Competition in Munich and other prestigious awards. Last night, this young string quartet -- who came together as students at the conservatory in Boulogne-Billancourt, a suburb to the west of Paris -- gave what will likely be the high point during this season of free concerts at the Library of Congress. The excellence of their performance makes me doubly regret having missed their previous appearances in Washington, last year at La Maison Française and in 2006 at the Corcoran, as well as a jazz concert in 2006, with a duo of saxophone and accordion, at the Library of Congress.