The Classical Music Network (English) Sun, 08 Nov 2026 04:39:42 +0100 http://www.concertonet.com/ http://www.concertonet.com/images/concertonet.jpg http://www.concertonet.com/
C. Johnson (© Courtesy of the Artist)


“The friends that have it I do wrong
Whenever I remake a song,
Should know what issue is at stake:
It is myself that I remake.”
William Butler Yeats


“To compose is to remember music that has never been written.”
Robert Schumann


It would be churlish and obviously misleading to say that Carter Johnson’s calm and steady demeanor was emblematic of his Canadian heritage. After all, Canada has not only produced not only his frequent partner, Angela Hewitt, some of the greatest idiosyncratic ]]>... Sun, 08 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0100 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17924
(© Sasha Onyshchenko)


The prospect of encountering yet another choreographic incarnation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, set to Felix Mendelssohn’s familiar incidental music, might initially have suggested a predictable evening. The ballet repertory already boasts such distinguished interpretations as George Balanchine’s, created for the New York City Ballet in 1962, Frederick Ashton’s The Dream, premiered by the Royal Ballet in 1964, and Christopher Wheeldon’s version, first presented in 1997. The surprise was therefore twofold: this was neither a revival of one of those celebrated choreographies]]>... Thu, 29 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0100 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17919
D. Keene with members Voices of Ascension (© Voices of Ascension)


“It has been said that my ‘Requiem’ does not express the fear of death, and someone has called it a lullaby of death. But it is thus that I see death: as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above…”
Gabriel Fauré


“What I long for with a deep ache inside me is sacred music. I long for the Fauré ‘Requiem’, for the Haydn ‘Mass in Time of War,’ for some pure celestial music...”
Poet May Sarton (Reflecting on the emotional and spiritual solace found in Haydn’s work during times of inner]]>... Thu, 29 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0100 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17915
Ensemble Connect (© Fadi Kheir Photography)


“As soon as the word ‘horn’ was uttered, somewhere inside my head I heard the sound of a horn as if coming from a distant forest in a fairy tale, just as in a poem.”
Győrgy Ligeti, on his Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano


“Music is the heartbeat of human existence; without it, life lacks its deepest rhythm.”
Zoltán Kodály


While I’ve heard the young artists of Ensemble Connect several times, only tonight in Weill Recital Hall was their ultimate secret revealed to me.


It wasn’t]]>... Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0100 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17910
(© Padraig Grant)


Wexford Festival Opera has made its name by rescuing operatic rarities from undeserved obscurity, but its annual gala serves an altogether different purpose. Eschewing the unfamiliar titles that constitute the festival’s principal raison d’être, it offers a succession of celebrated arias, duets and ensembles, interspersed with operetta, musical theatre and other lighter fare. This is, in part, an expression of gratitude towards the local community, whose steadfast support is indispensable to the festival’s survival and flourishing. There is something particularly endearing about this aspect of Wexf]]>... Sun, 25 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17912
Miró String Quartet (© Jeff Wilson)


“I guess I’d like people to be able to forget a lot of things and just enjoy the beauty of harmony and melody for a moment.”
Caroline Shaw


“Easy mind, light heart. A mind that is too easy hides a heart that is too heavy.”
Franz Schubert


Our October musical surprise? Two pieces by Anton Webern in the space of one week.


True, one could say that the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Im Sommerwind and last night’s Mi]]>... Fri, 23 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17901
R. Cumming, C. Baker (© Padraig Grant)


Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (1852‑1924) was an Irish‑born composer, influential teacher and leading figure in Britain’s late Victorian musical renaissance. Though best known for church music and Shamus O’Brien (1896), he composed nine operas in an effort to establish a native tradition capable of rivaling continental models. Much Ado About Nothing, premiered at Covent Garden in 1901, set much of Shakespeare’s language to music in an ambitious English operatic adaptation.


Wexford presented the opera in a pocket version of roughly ninet]]>... Wed, 21 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17899
R. Warren, E. Fflur (© Padraig Grant)


Michael William Balfe (1808-1870) occupies a neglected but significant place in nineteenth-century opera. The Irish composer achieved international success and is remembered chiefly for The Bohemian Girl (1843), whose aria “I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls” has long outlived the stage work. Its popularity points to a composer whose melodic gifts were once widely valued, even if his operas have since vanished from the repertory.


A violinist, singer and composer, Balfe absorbed Italian opera while performing in Paris and studying in Italy before settling in ]]>... Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17904
(© Padraig Grant)


What happens when opera arrives in a small Irish town and turns everyday life upside down? That is the delightful premise of The First Festival, a new one‑act opera by composer Alberto Caruso and librettist Colm Tóibín, commissioned to mark the seventy‑fifth anniversary of Wexford Festival Opera.


Set in October 1951, the year of the festival’s founding, the work imagines how the arrival of international opera singers might have disrupted the romantic lives of local residents. Rather than recounting the institution’s history, Tóibín and Caruso offer a comedy of lov]]>... Mon, 19 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17905
I. Onishchenko (© Padraig Grant)


There are operas whose reputations owe less to any deficiency in their musical or dramatic substance than to the formidable demands they make upon their audiences. Sergei Prokofiev’s The Gambler (Igrok), based on Dostoyevsky’s novel of 1866, is one such work. Begun in 1915‑16 and completed in its original version in 1917, it had to wait until 1929 for its première in Brussels, the upheavals of the Russian Revolution having interrupted its initial progress towards the stage. Wexford Festival Opera’s decision to present it in Russian, in a compelling new production by Ivan ]]>... Sun, 18 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17898
M. Barakova (© Padraig Grant)


Composed in 1811, when Gioachino Rossini (1792‑1868) was a mere nineteen, L’equivoco stravagante is an amusing, if uneven, comedy whose musical idiom owes more to Domenico Cimarosa (1749‑1801) and Giovanni Paisiello (1740‑1816) than to the Rossini of international renown. Yet what is most remarkable about this early work is not so much its musical precocity as the audacity of its libretto. Gaetano Gasbarri furnished the young composer with a text that combines social satire, intellectual mockery and sexual innuendo with a degree of impudence that proved too much for th]]>... Fri, 16 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17896
E. Taylor, G. Perregrino (© Eric Waters)


There was a time in the United States, several generations ago, when school‑age children studied classical music as part of a normal education. This encompassed exposure to much of the important symphonic repertory, but also included what was charmingly referred to at the time as ‘the ABC’s of opera.’


As one might guess, this basic operatic highlights course provided introductions to Verdi’s Aida [A], Puccini’s La bohème [B], and the final C designated Bizet’s Carmen. These three scores were considered the most beloved works eve]]>... Fri, 16 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17893
Takács Quartet (© Amanda Tipton)


“If the sight of my handwriting checks your tears, put the letter away for we have nothing left now but to weep from our inmost hearts.”
Felix Mendelssohn, to his late sister’s husband.


“Sometimes you wish you could go back and ask your teachers again to guide you; but up there onstage, exactly where they always wanted you to be, you must simply find your way. They have given all the help they can; the only person who can solve the labyrinth of yourself is you.”
Jeremy Denk


One marriage in musical heaven is rare]]>... Fri, 16 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17882
(© Padraig Grant)


Among the more extraordinary figures in the history of Christianity was Saint Simeon Stylites (c. 390‑459), a Syrian ascetic who, dissatisfied with the rigours of conventional monastic existence, sought a more radical form of spiritual renunciation. His chosen abode was the top of a pillar, where he remained for decades, exposed to the elements and removed from the ordinary commerce of human society. Yet the more assiduously he withdrew from the world, the more the world came to him. Pilgrims, supplicants and the merely curious flocked to behold the singular spectacle of a man who had elevated phys]]>... Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17906
L. Gu (© Padraig Grant)


Some will recognise the opening and closing Hymn to the Sun and Osaka’s Act I serenade, “Apri la tua finestra”, subsequently recalled by Iris in the third act. Beyond these comparatively familiar landmarks, Pietro Mascagni’s Iris offers few melodies that readily lodge in the memory. Its lyrical inspiration is intermittent, its dramatic continuity uneven, and its orchestral writing sometimes less compelling than its most ardent vocal outbursts. Compared with his contemporary Giacomo Puccini, Mascagni was a more modest melodic inventor, which helps explain why the composer who took the o]]>... Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17900
V. Christopoulos/N. Kazantzakis (© Oper Graz/KANIZAJ)


“This is true happiness: to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition. To live far from men, not to need them and yet to love them. To have the stars above, the land to your left and the sea to your right and to realize of a sudden that in your heart, life has accomplished its final miracle: it has become a fairy tale.”
Nikos Kazantzakis


“After visiting Greece, I could never paint the same way again. I saw colors, I heard music which I never knew existed.”
Marc Chagall

<]]>... Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17877
Y. Nézet-Séguin (© George Etheredge/Deutsche Grammophon)


“We probably derive all our rhythms and themes from Nature, which offers them to us, pregnant with meaning in every animal noise. My music is throughout and always, but a sound of Nature.”
Gustav Mahler


“Music is natural law, as related to the sense of hearing.”
Anton Webern


The Philadelphia Orchestra has been helmed by a few truly revolutionary (and eccentric) conductors, including Ormandy and Stokowski. Their present leader, Yannick Nézet‑Séguin, has been with them for 15 years, and the]]>... Tue, 13 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17874
C. Van Horn, N. Solodovnikova, A. El-Khashem (© Cory Weaver)


Since the mid-19^th century, there has been opera in Chicago.


Some of it was provided by various touring companies, while repeated attempts at establishing permanency came and went, usually as a result of fiscal insolvency; even more than a century ago, opera was a costly endeavor, requiring, as it does today, generous donors with deep pockets.


In 1921, the famous Scottish soprano Mary Garden (1874‑1967) was the familiar visage of several prominent Windy City arts organizations, using them, perhaps uni]]>... Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17908
V. Olafsson (© Ari Magg)


“I push Brahms away contemptuously. His music is a noisy, reverberating void. Only once or twice is Brahms expressive of an original emotion, and that emotion is the feeling of despondency, grief, melancholy...around in him by a sense of his own emotional impotence.”
Boston Musical Record, 1900


“‘Zarathustra’ doesn’t speak. He shouts and whispers, mumbles and roars. He does everything but speak.”
Boston Daily Advertiser, 1897


The opening Brahms First Piano Concerto last night was not supposed t]]>... Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17863
G. Shaham (© Chris Lee)


Some day I hope to interview violinist Gil Shaham, not about his philosophy of music or the techniques and insights that make him a great artist. Rather, I would ask him the secret to happiness. If Shaham has ever had a bad day, I certainly have not witnessed it. When he strode onto the stage at the Kimmel Center, as he did recently to play Saint-Saëns’ Violin Concerto No. 3, he looked as though he were having the best day of his life and about to take us with him. There is nothing fake or artificial about his smile or the radiant energy that tracks every bold step. Just before perfor]]>... Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17869
Momenta Quartet (© John Gurrin)


“Microtonal harmony can make chords more pure and consonant, countering the common perception that it only produces dissonance.”
Harry Partch


“To express that which is in you in sincerity, in the clearest and most perfect manner, would seem to me the ultimate goal in art.”
Gabriel Fauré


The Momenta Quartet lived up to its name last night. For the first of two nights in their eleventh Momenta Festival, they plunged through the micro-temporal spaces of Matthew Greenbaum’s In Transit, filled those quantum spa]]>... Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17859
Expulsion clip from Die Stadt ohne Juden (© Film Clip)


“...the Germans love frankness and honesty. It is so convenient to be frank and honest. This confidingness, this complacence, is probably the most dangerous and most successful disguise which the German is up to nowadays.”
Friedrich Nietzsche


“It pounds daily on the nerves: the insanity of numbers, the uncertain future... An epidemic of fear and naked need: lines of shoppers, long since a customary sight, once more form in front of shops, first in front of one, then in front of all... The lines always send the same s]]>... Sun, 04 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17850
(© Roberto Ricci/Festival Verdi)


Few operas have acquired a historical reputation as disproportionate to their dramatic complexity as Nabucco. Verdi’s third opera, premiered at La Scala in 1842, was his first resounding success and the work that established him as a major force in Italian musical theatre. Yet its importance extends beyond the familiar legend of a composer rescued from despair by the unexpected success of “Va, pensiero.” At a time when bel canto conventions still governed much of Italian opera, Verdi and his librettist, Temistocle Solera, subordinated the customary amorous intrigue to a confl]]>... Sat, 03 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17892
(© Roberto Ricci)


There are few experiences more evocative for an opera lover than hearing Verdi in Busseto, the town in which the composer was born. The Festival Verdi had wisely expanded its geographical horizons beyond Parma’s Teatro Regio, extending its programme into the surrounding towns and thereby restoring a measure of territorial breadth to an undertaking that might otherwise have remained confined to the provincial capital. Having previously attended a performance of Il trovatore in the little‑used theatre of Fidenza, I was pl]]>... Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17881 The quintessential Romantic ballet, Giselle, is for a ballerina what Everest is for a mountaineer: the supreme test of technique, artistry and dramatic intelligence. Few roles demand such an accomplished synthesis of seemingly antithetical qualities, from the ingenuous spontaneity of the village girl in Act I to the ethereal, almost disembodied lyricism of the Wili in Act II. Betrayed by the man she loves, Giselle dies of grief, only to return from the grave as one of the supernatural maidens condemned to dance by night. Yet the role’s enduring fascination lies in something more complex than this metamorphosis from innocence to spectral transcendence. Giselle must remain recognisably human even when she has ceased to belong to the world]]>... Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17891