The Classical Music Network (English) Sun, 25 Oct 2026 02:31:10 +0100 http://www.concertonet.com/ http://www.concertonet.com/images/concertonet.jpg http://www.concertonet.com/ ”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





Miró String Quartet(©Jeff Wilson)



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


True, one could say that the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Im Sommerwind and last night’s Miró Quartet’s L]]>... 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
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
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
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
(© Roberto Ricci/Festival Verdi)


There are few operas whose reputations have been so effectively reduced to a single sentence attributed to their composer. Verdi’s “questa è proprio brutta” has followed Alzira (1845) through its sparse performance history, providing a convenient epitaph for his eighth opera. The verdict was hardly inexplicable. Written between Ernani (1844) and Macbeth (1847), it belonged to a period in which Verdi was rapidly consolidating his dramatic language, yet it lacked the coherence and force that distinguished the works on either side of it. The Parma revival, conducted b]]>... Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17885
Y. Nézet-Séguin (© Diana Antal)


There seems to be an endless need for short pieces for large orchestras. I must have heard half a dozen such works on programs featuring Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, some custom‑written, others pulled from the archives. Composing such small but high‑impact pieces is a great way for contemporary composers, especially woman and people of color, to get a foot in the door to having their music played. Sometimes, that is as far as it goes, and we miss hearing what these new composers would say if given a half hour or more to share their musical thoughts.


L]]>... Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17849
P. Herreweghe (© Antoine Saito)


The pairing of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto and Schubert’s Ninth Symphony offered more than an attractive juxtaposition of two monuments of early Austro-German Romanticism. It also brought together two works whose historical relationship was unusually intimate: Mendelssohn, an ardent admirer of Schubert, had championed the latter’s neglected C major Symphony, conducting its first public performance in Leipzig in 1839, eleven years after its composer’s death. The OSM’s programme thus traced a musical kinship as well as a succession of masterpieces. Yet Thursday’s concert]]>... Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17842
M. Hundeling, K. MacKinnon (© Vivien Gaumand)


Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot occupied an anomalous place in his œuvre. It was the culmination of the composer’s theatrical genius and, at the same time, the work in which he most radically abandoned the intimate verismo-inflected lyricism of La bohème, Tosca and Madama Butterfly. Its gigantic orchestral apparatus, harmonic audacity and fascination with colour announced a composer already looking toward the musical language of the twentieth century. Yet Turandot was also, irreducibly, a fairy tale. Its ancestry was literary rather than historical]]>... Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17835
Y. Nézet‑Séguin, A. Kantorow (© Pete Checchia)


What an opening to a new season! The Philadelphia Orchestra under Yannick Nézet‑Séguin launched 2026-2027 with a dazzling debut and a world premiere of global significance. I’m referring to French pianist Alexandre Kantorow performing the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1, followed after intermission by an adaptation for orchestra of Bernstein’s MASS by Garth Edwin Sunderland.


Let me say flat out that I have never heard such a performance of the Brahms’ concerto. Like Yannick (revealed in his opening remarks and reminiscences), I have ]]>... Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17833
L. Lang, R. Payare (© Antoine Saito)


The advertised sovereign of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal’s September 23 concert was, naturally, Lang Lang. Yet the evening’s most intriguing discovery came before he had played a note, in Mayer’s Overture No. 2. And its most tantalizing promise came in the opening movement of Sibelius’s Second Symphony, a promise that Rafael Payare’s subsequent interpretive choices did not entirely fulfill. Between those two discoveries stood a Beethoven Emperor that proved considerably more rewarding than anticipated.


Emilie Mayer (1812-1883) deserves]]>... Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17832
New York Polyphony at Utstein Kloster, Mosterøy, Norway
(© Nino Felbab)


“Singing is the only way to know where Nature has bestowed the benefit of a good voice: which gift is so rare, as there is not one among a thousand that has it: and, in many,that excellent gift is lost, because they want Art to express Nature.”
William Byrd


“...And how one can imagine oneself among them/I do not know;/It was all so unimaginably different/And all so long ago.”
Louis MacNeice, October


Poet Louis MacNeice in his stunning October was referrin]]>... Sat, 19 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17822
(© Marie Staggat)


There are composers whose juvenilia one admires out of historical curiosity, and then there is Mahler. Das klagende Lied, begun when its composer was barely twenty, is not so much an apprentice work as an artistic premonition: a gigantic, occasionally unruly canvas in which the future First, Second and Third Symphonies can already be glimpsed in embryo. Wagnerian catastrophe, German Romantic folklore, grotesque humour, funeral music, fanfares, supernatural revelation and orchestral extravagance are all present, if not yet entirely domesticated.


The OSM’s]]>... Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17819
J. Sigerson, Schiller Institute NYC Chorus (© Schiller NYC Chorus)


“Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of bags of nails, with here and there, a hammer dropped.”
Artist John Ruskin


“At a certain place in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, he might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome, with the dream of immortality in his heart; all the stars seem to glimmer around him, and the earth seems to sink ever deeper downwards.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits


Last night, the 25]]>... Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0200 http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=17810