REVIEW: Adams Conducts Adams at New York Philharmonic

It has been suggested that composers shouldn’t conduct their own music. But, John Adams, whose Antony and Cleopatra will premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in the spring, disproved the theory, leading a thoroughly convincing and brilliantly played evening of mostly American twentieth- and twenty-first century compositions.

REVIEW: Pacifica Quartet's Portrait of America at 92NY

Grammy-winning Pacifica Quartet painted a monumental portrait of the United States in their recent American Snapshots: JFK, Vietnam, and Ellis Island at 92NY, indemnifying music from two of America’s darkest moments — from two of America’s worthiest twentieth century composers, Samuel Barber and George Crumb — with a symbol of its optimism and possibility, Antonín Dvořák’s “American” Quartet.

REVIEW: NYFOS Makes Space For New Music

An art song recital is the last place remaining for an audience to hear an unamplified singer in an intimate setting; as such, it always has a whiff of the 19th century about it. But NYFOS Next, the venerable New York Festival of Song’s new music series, showed in their recent program “A Space to Make” that the ancient form is alive and very much kicking in the hands of the current generation of practitioners.

REVIEW: Phantasias and Variations - Angela Hewitt Turns Focus To Mozart

Angela Hewitt — esteemed as one of today’s master interpreters of J. S. Bach, having recorded and performed the Baroque master’s complete ouvre for ten fingers to great acclaim in recent years, has embarked on her next chapter, The Mozart Odyssey, a survey of Mozart’s piano concertos around the globe. Hewitt began her latest concert in Kaufman Auditorium at 92NY with Mozart’s Phantasia, beautifully paced and technically graceful, adding her own flare to the written ornaments — as an opera in miniature.

REVIEW: MasterVoices Strikes Up the Band

Someday this inflamed election season will be something to reflect upon, and one of my fondest memories of the period will be the soothing balm applied by MasterVoices’ effervescent concert presentation of Strike Up the Band, the satirical operetta from 1927 with a score by George and Ira Gershwin and an antiwar Marx Brothers-style book by George S. Kaufman.

REVIEW: The Knights Slay Beethoven's Fourth and Assorted Rhapsodies

The centennial of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue continued into its fourth quarter with The Knights’ latest at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, featuring a world premiere as part of their multi-season Rhapsody-themed commissioning project. The Brooklyn-based orchestra welcomed pianist Aaron Diehl for a unique take on Gershwin’s familiar piece for piano and orchestra, a new composition for the same combination by Michael Schachter, balanced, in a stroke of programming ingenuity, with Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony.

REVIEW: Daniil Trifonov Waltzes Through Moody Program

Trifonov’s swap of Barber with Rachmaninoff’s Variations on a Theme of Corelli raised the question of what story this unusual program was telling, especially, after experiencing the Sturm und Drang of the curtain-raiser. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Piano Sonata in C-sharp Minor, a posthumously published work, dating from 1865 when the composer was a 25 year old student, was a fascinating concert opener.

REVIEW: The Philadelphia Orchestra's Sublime Mahler's Third

Mahler’s Third, which clocked roughly an hour-and-three-quarters this evening and requires women’s chorus, children’s chorus, alto soloist, and orchestral heft including eight horns, is more seldom programmed than his Second, or Bruckner’s Seventh (a mere hour-and-ten-minutes). But, Nézet-Séguin commands this monumental epic assuredly, not wasting a drop of the legendary Philadelphia institution inherited from legendary maestros such as Stokowski and Ormandy. And Mahler’s Third is as Mahlerian as his symphonies come — a broad canvas on which he depicts and explores “nature,” and the human experience, in the broadest sense.

REVIEW: New York Philharmonic Makes It About the Music

Eyes and ears are focused on the New York Philharmonic this week. A new collective bargaining agreement with the American Federation of Musicians has been reached, promising significant pay increases and important cultural changes. Future music director Gustavo Dudamel doesn’t take the helm until 2026, and role of CEO is currently in limbo.

REVIEW: American Classical Orchestra Celebrates 40 Years

The American Classical Orchestra opened their 40th season on a joyful note. Under the baton of Artistic Director Thomas Crawford, Wednesday’s concert at Alice Tully Hall celebrated the audience as much as the venerable period-instrument ensemble itself. Serving up one of classical music’s great crowd-pleasers, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, Crawford combined a light, breezy touch with heartfelt investment in the music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

REVIEW: Imagining a World Without Humans

mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning] was presented here in an hour-long version ... The piece takes as its premise that humans have all suddenly disappeared, and explores what might happen to the planet afterwards, taking its cue from Alan Weisman's 2007 book "The World Without Us." It's billed as an opera, but at least in this incarnation is more of a semi-staged oratorio; while the five excellent performers (Gelsey Bell, Aviva Jaye, Brian McCorkle, Mia Pak, and Paul Pinto) have character names listed in the program, they are never used, nor do they interact as ongoing characters.