★★★★★
As popular as Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake" has been since its first performance in 1877), it's unlikely that most ballet audiences have given the music itself the attention it deserves. That's understandable; pit orchestras at ballet performances tend to be undersized and underrehearsed. Now, in Swan Lake, Michael Tilson Thomas and his London Symphony make amends in probing, splendidly responsive performance that reveals Tchaikovsky's great 150-minute score as the masterpiece it is...
- ew.com
2009-06-12
★★★★★
Overlapping textures and soft, shifting timbres are the most recognizable features of Morton Feldman's music, and his attractive sonorities draw listeners in ways other avant-garde sound structures may not. This music's appeal is also attributable to its gentle ambience, a static, meditative style that Feldman pioneered long before trance music became commonplace...
- music.aol.com
2008-08-27
★★★★★
This hour-long work, commissioned by West German Radio and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, marks a transitional period for Reich. Based in the rhythmic pulse of Music for 18 Musicians, he adds a text by William Carlos Williams (sung by a full chorus), uses the more traditional sounds of a full orchestra (strings and brass are suddenly prominent), and snatches of melody dot the musical canvas here and there. The use of vocals here looks forward to such projects as Different Trains and The Cave...
- music.aol.com
2008-08-27
★★★★★
It takes more than a great conductor to lead a great performance of Mahler's Symphony No. 3. It takes a true believer, a conductor who has complete faith in Mahler's ecstatic vision and who can embody it in sound. It takes a conductor who cannot only express everything in the work, from the primordial matter of the opening movement to the sublime ether of the closing movement, but whose absolute faith in Mahler's Third can make even the most obdurate listener believe in every note...
- music.aol.com
2008-08-27
★★★★★
Michael Tilson Thomas and the Philharmonia Orchestra perform a splendid version of the Christmastime classic, with highlights featured here. Songs include "Arrival of Drosselmeyer," "Clara and the Nutcracker," "Waltz of the Snowflakes," "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy," "Decoration of the Christmas Tree," "Grandfather's Dance" and "Waltz of the Flowers."
- music.aol.com
2008-08-27
★★★★★
Aaron Copland may well be the best-known, the most loved, and the all-around greatest of twentieth century American composers, but his music from the '20s and '30s is still relatively unknown, still relatively unloved, and of still questionable greatness. Was Copland the Modernist too far out to connect to a big audience so he re-created himself as Copland the Populist to become the best-known, most loved, and greatest American composer...
- music.aol.com
2008-08-27
★★★★★
Of the composers generally referred to as "minimalist" (a label almost universally rejected by those to whom it is applied), three have had a substantial and direct impact on modern music both popular and classical since the 1960s: Philip Glass, Steve Reich and, to a somewhat lesser degree, John Adams...
- music.aol.com
2008-08-27
★★★★★
Reviewers who've heard Elvis Costello's Il sogno live in concert have diverged as to its merits, although a certain look-how-surprisingly-well-he-did quality is detectable in the positive opinions. This orchestral work was written for an Italian dance company that had adapted Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream into a ballet ("il sogno" means "the dream" in Italian), and it followed several smaller ventures Costello had made into the realm of classical music...
- music.aol.com
2008-08-27
Loading...
