One Afternoon, Two Spectacular Orchestras: Symphonies from Washington and Pittsburgh overlapped with passionate performances

The New York Times

By Anthony Tommasini and Zachary Woolfe

At 2 p.m., Gianandrea Noseda gave the downbeat at Carnegie Hall for the National Symphony Orchestra, which he took over last season. A few blocks uptown and an hour later, a veteran pairing, Manfred Honeck and his Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, played at David Geffen Hall.

Our critics were at both concerts.

Anthony Tommasini on the National Symphony Orchestra

Mr. Noseda led exhilarating performances of two seldom-heard works: Liszt’s “Dante Symphony” and Rossini’s “Stabat Mater.”

The hall had originally booked him to conduct the forces of the Teatro Regio Torino, from Italy, in a concert performance of Verdi’s “I Vespri Siciliani.” But that appearance was abandoned last spring when Mr. Noseda quit as the theater’s music director to protest mismanagement and budget cuts.

Since 2017, Mr. Noseda had also been thriving as music director of the National Symphony. So he arranged with Carnegie to bring his Washington band to New York instead. The members of the audience on Sunday were the winners.

Liszt, who revered Dante, struggled to compose an epic symphony based on “The Divine Comedy.” The episodic, 52-minute work that resulted can come across as meandering and long-winded.

Not here. For all the intensity of the playing, the performance revealed the work’s surefire structure. The symphony opens with a stern proclamation in the low strings and brass that evokes infernal depths and soon turns frenzied. A calmer episode depicts the grieving voice of the lustful Francesca da Rimini trapped in an eternal whirlwind. Satanic fury returns and crests into a shattering climax that Mr. Noseda drove to a pitch of blazing, demonic fervor.

Whole stretches of the ruminative “Purgatorio” movement are diaphanous and mystical, interspersed with chorale-like passages and an grimly industrious fugue. The symphony ends celestially with a tender setting of lines from the Magnificat, beautifully sung here by the soprano Erika Grimaldi and the women of the University of Maryland Concert Choir.

A few years after suddenly retiring, at 37, from a sensational career in opera, Rossini was persuaded to accept a private commission to set the “Stabat Mater” text, a meditation on Mary as a mother grappling with the death of her son. Rossini the opera composer comes through often in this sacred score: The “Cujus animam” movement could be a stirring heroic tenor aria.

The operatic trappings actually enhance the work’s majestic and sublime qualities. The music is spiritual yet invitingly theatrical, especially in this magnificent performance. Ms. Grimaldi, the mezzo-soprano Chiara Amarù, the tenor Michele Angelini and the bass-baritone Marko Mimica were fine soloists. The singing of the full chorus was wonderfully youthful yet sensitive.

Zachary Woolfe on the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra

Neither of the works Mr. Honeck played with his Pittsburgh ensemble at Geffen Hall was similarly rare. As my colleague David Allen wrote in a recent essay, this conductor and orchestra have made their impact, both on record and in performance, largely in the standards.

But what an impact.

From the glittering burst of strings at the start of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Piano Concerto to the sleek heat of the finale of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, this was immaculate yet impassioned playing — with a certain patrician, distinguished quality that never fell into stuffiness or rigidity. The performance was aristocratic, in the best sense.

Till Fellner was a perfectly suited partner for this group in the Beethoven: courtly and elegant, with a bit of reserve but also welcome flexibility. Orchestra and soloist responded as one to Mr. Honeck’s generous malleability of pulse. The second movement started more swiftly than the usual, giving Mr. Fellner’s entrance at a slightly slower tempo a subtle charge of drama.

That slow movement was an eloquent pastoral, not casual but relaxed and sunny, breaking into a grand, dancey Rondo finale that, as it progressed, seemed more and more fascinating — its variations forming and dissolving in a mood of confident experimentation.

Stay on top of the latest in pop and jazz with reviews, interviews, podcasts and more from The New York Times music critics.

The icy-hot sweep of the strings is a particular glory of this ensemble — Alexi Kenney, a young star violinist, played as a guest in the orchestra’s currently empty concertmaster chair — but the Mahler symphony showcased superb work from every section: the incantatory trumpet solo of the opening; sculpted and tender horn solos later on; warm winds; alert and subtle percussion. Throughout there was a sense of transparency — a perception of all the layers — even at full tilt of speed and volume.

Continue reading…

The Pittsburgh Symphony Sets a New Standard for the Standards

By David Allen

PITTSBURGH — “What is the reason to bring out a Beethoven Five, or Seven, or Three?” the conductor Manfred Honeck asked, turning to the question of recordings of canonical symphonies. “Another CD in the world. My God, who cares?”

With hundreds of “Eroicas” available at the push of a thumb, who, indeed? What could there possibly be left to say?

Quite a lot, as it turns out, and Mr. Honeck is saying it with the Pittsburgh Symphony, long one of the finest American ensembles but just a few years past a bruising musicians’ strike. When the orchestra and Mr. Honeck, its music director since 2008, arrive in New York to perform Beethoven and Mahler at David Geffen Hall on May 19, five years since they last appeared in the city, they will arrive having built their reputation by recording the standard repertoire, formidably well.

“If I do it,” Mr. Honeck said in a recent interview in his office in Heinz Hall, the ornate former movie palace in Pittsburgh that houses the symphony, “I want to do it as good as I can do it.”

Good barely covers it. All eight of the releases that the Pittsburgh forces have brought out on Reference Recordings, with the aid of microphone whizzes from Soundmirror, come with the highest of recommendations. (Earlier recordings, primarily of Mahler, are now hard to find on a Japanese imprint, Exton.) Four have received nominations for the Grammy for best orchestral performance. One, of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 and Barber’s Adagio for Strings, won in 2018.

There’s a properly idiomatic account of Dvorak’s Eighth Symphony that comes with a clever suite from Janacek’s “Jenufa,” one of several operatic compilations that Mr. Honeck has conceived and had executed by the composer Tomas Ille. Another, from Dvorak’s “Rusalka,” appears with a desolate Tchaikovsky Sixth. There’s a radiant, faithful take on Bruckner’s Fourth, which bodes well for that composer’s Ninth, due for release this fall. There are two sensationally powerful discs of Strauss, one of tone poems, the other of suites from “Der Rosenkavalier” and “Elektra.”

And yes, there’s a Beethoven Five, a Beethoven Seven and a Beethoven Three, easily the most enthralling and involving recordings of these most major of major symphonies I have heard in years. The 2015 coupling of the Fifth and Seventh seethes with ideas, transcending tedious debates about period practice to sound utterly fresh and free. The 2018 release of the “Eroica” is better still, showing off the orchestra’s spectacular playing, which marries deft refinement to forceful physicality.

Why are these recordings so breathtakingly good? Plenty of orchestras record, after all, and most record in the same way they do in Pittsburgh. They tape several concerts of the same program live, usually three or four. There’s a patching session to fix errors and correct details. Then there’s editing.

And in this conductor’s case, there’s more editing. Minute editing. Relentless editing.

“Even one note, it can annoy you for weeks,” Mr. Honeck said, laughing. “You ask our sound guys. They suffer.”

His fastidious preparation is reflected in the practical, how-to booklet notes that he writes for the recordings, thousands of words long and full of endless detail about the choices he has made. He writes his own bowings. He tinkers with the instrumentation. He reads deeply, and dreams up metaphors to sharpen the imagery.

It’s a technique that Mr. Honeck, born in Austria in 1958, learned from the very best. As a violist in the Vienna Philharmonic from 1986 to 1992, he played under a who’s-who of conductors, including Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan. He talked about historical performance with Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and assisted Claudio Abbado. But one man stood out.

“The temptation,” Mr. Honeck said, “is for conductors to say, ‘Oh, it’s too soft, too loud, too quick, too slow.’ That’s four terms, and within two and half hours you hear these all the time. You can imagine, it’s boring. But Carlos Kleiber, he asked with every phrase we do, why do we do it? What is the context of the music? He brought pictures, images of that.”

The horn player Stephen Kostyniak, who serves as chairman of the Pittsburgh musicians’ committee, recalled an early appearance, in the period between Mr. Honeck turning down the Czech Philharmonic in favor of the Pittsburgh Symphony in January 2007 and when he formally took up the post in September 2008.

Stay on top of the latest in pop and jazz with reviews, interviews, podcasts and more from The New York Times music critics.

Why are Mr. Honeck’s recordings with the Pittsburgh Symphony so breathtakingly good? Editing. Minute editing. Relentless editing.CreditMaddie McGarvey for The New York Times

Why are Mr. Honeck’s recordings with the Pittsburgh Symphony so breathtakingly good? Editing. Minute editing. Relentless editing.CreditMaddie McGarvey for The New York Times

“We did ‘Ein Heldenleben’,” Mr. Kostyniak said. “He wanted one particular quintuplet rhythm a certain way, because in his mind it’s when Strauss’s wife slaps him and says, ‘Shut up!’”

Mr. Honeck, added Mr. Kostyniak, was “not one of the tyrants of old, but he’s very particular in what he wants, and he doesn’t mind taking the time out of rehearsal to really make sure that it’s there.”

Kleiber’s example does not stop with evocative imagery. Playing under that enigmatic, combustible genius taught Mr. Honeck that conducting is a bodily pursuit, a physical recreation of the sound you want. He painstakingly rehearses the shape and speed of the hand movements he will use to trace a phrase, and the body positions he will need to take up to win the right kind of emphasis. Although Mr. Honeck is by no means copying his precursor, a certain similarity of gesture is obvious to anyone who has spent too much time watching old Kleibervideos on YouTube.

“A violinist has the Oistrakh technique, or the Auer technique,” Mr. Honeck said. “We forget that conductors also have a technique. It’s not just 1-2-3-4. That’s like a fingering.”

“I found out that this technique brings you to much more refined music-making,” he added.

Continue reading…

Noseda, NSO offer French program with Italian accent

The Washington Post

By Anne Midgette

The program was French; the accent was Italian. Gianandrea Noseda is continuing to show Washington, and the National Symphony Orchestra, what he and they can do together. Thursday night — two days after the orchestra surprised him with a serenade for his 55th birthday — saw Noseda in avuncular mode, offering a chatty introduction to a program of three pieces that showed a narrow slice of French chronology and a broad spectrum of orchestral color. Then he turned around and let loose at and with the orchestra.

The curiosity on the program was Franck’s “Le Chasseur maudit,” a high-Gothic piece of rollicking drama with strong German overtones, not only in the layered group of horns that opened the piece but in the wind melodies and agitated string figures that evoked clear memories of Richard Wagner. Its clear drama and big scale — despite its relative shortness (15 minutes) made it a good fit for Noseda’s generous driving gestures, and the NSO horns sounded great.

Ravel’s G major piano concerto is too well-known to be really curious, but the performance was unusual nonetheless: unusual, at least, in that the orchestra sounded a little wild and unfamiliar, even as it sinuously curved around the piece’s jazzy inflections. The main focus here, though, was on the pianist Seong-Jin Cho. The winner of the Chopin Competition in 2015 and a third-place finisher in the Tchaikovsky Competition before that (when he was only 17), Cho, still in his mid-20s, plays not only with panache but with depth and sensitivity. Many young competition phenoms excel at the whiz-bang parts; Cho shone in the dreamy second movement, spinning it out into a long building fantasy that one didn’t want to end. Noseda conducted the young artist’s debut on Deutsche Grammophon in 2016, and picked him to appear with him at Wolf Trap in one of the first concerts of his tenure in Washington in 2017 — a concert Noseda was subsequently forced to cancel due to back surgery, though Cho played without him. It was worth the wait to hear them together.

Continue reading….

Mozart's Requiem Gets a Fresh Spin at the Philharmonic

The New York Times

By Joshua Barone

If you want to see how an orchestra can give a fresh polish to dusty old Mozart, head to Lincoln Center.

There you’ll find a surprisingly novel Mozart program — played by the New York Philharmonic on Wednesday night under Manfred Honeck and continuing through Tuesday — that, like a fugue, tells a story of the composer’s final year while mapping a journey of death and transcendence.

Unlike Schubert, whose later works have an autumnal mood colored by sickness and melancholy, Mozart didn’t begin the year 1791 knowing that, months after his 35th birthday, he would fall ill and die soon after, on Dec. 5. So you would be hard-pressed to find a sense of farewell in his music from that time.

In fact, for most of the year Mozart was as stylistically nimble and prolific as ever. He presented the premieres of not one, but two operas, “La Clemenza di Tito” and “Die Zauberflöte.” And, in what would be his final public appearance as a pianist, he gave the first performance of his Piano Concerto No. 27 in B flat, which the Philharmonic opened its program with on Wednesday, featuring Richard Goode.

This gently dignified piece, with childlike simplicity and few extremes, all but dares its soloist to achieve majesty at a whisper, to only suggest virtuosity. Mr. Goode, an elder statesman of Mozart’s music, was calmly authoritative, gliding through quick runs and playing with restrained lyricism. Even his galloping rhythms had an unpretentious lightness, more like a pony than a Clydesdale.

He didn’t perform an encore, which only heightened the contrast between the rosy concerto, a triumph of early 1791, and what followed after intermission: the Requiem, left unfinished at Mozart’s death.

Richard Goode, an elder statesman of Mozart’s music, was the soloist in the composer’s Piano Concerto No. 27 in B flat.CreditCaitlin Ochs for The New York Times

Mr. Honeck, who as the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra’s music director has repeatedly found original ways to present the Requiem there, opted this week for a programmatic medley: “Masonic Funeral Music,” the Requiem and “Ave Verum Corpus,” played without pause for a loose narrative about, as one of the texts says, “a foretaste of heaven in death’s agony.”

“Masonic Funeral Music” is the program’s exception, the one work notfrom 1791. (It was written in 1785.) But listen closely and you’ll hear eerie similarities with the Requiem. Like that piece, its orchestration calls for basset horns and leans heavily on the lower strings, setting a richly somber tone that conjures an organ-like timbre. Mozart never meant for it to be an overture for the Requiem, but on Wednesday the juxtaposition was seamless.

ADVERTISEMENT

And this move — adding a prologue to the Requiem, with an epilogue on the way — was hardly as unusual as Mr. Honeck’s presentation of the Requiem itself. After Mozart’s death, the work was completed by his pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr, whose edition was long the standard for orchestras around the world.

The problem often is that it’s all too easy to tell where Mozart’s sophistication ends and Süssmayr’s well-intended inferiority begins. Mr. Honeck’s solution is to cut the final sections and present the Requiem as Mozart left it — almost.

His version begins with the seven completed sections, followed by the Lacrimosa and Offertorium composed by Mozart but finished by Süssmayr. Then it ends with the Lacrimosa — though now as only Mozart’s fragment, the last eight measures of music he ever wrote. Further complicating things, Mr. Honeck, according to the Philharmonic, also has his own changes to the Süssmayr orchestrations.

Continue reading…

Anne-Sophie Mutter Pays Tribute to Previn at Carnegie Hall

The New York Times

By Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim

Ghosts were always going to be part of the star violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter’s recital at Carnegie Hall this week. The advertised program featured Mozart, as well as the spirit of that composer as it flickers through later French music. And the concert was also to include Sebastian Currier’s new “Ghost Trio,” which riffs on themes of influence and musical forebears.

But when Ms. Mutter and her longtime chamber music partner, the pianist Lambert Orkis, took to the stage at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday, the specter most strongly felt was that of André Previn, the conductor, composer and musical polymath. Ms. Mutter and Mr. Previn were once married, and remained close friends and artistic collaborators until his death on Feb. 28.

And so, at the end of an evening of brilliant and often uncannily delicate music-making, Ms. Mutter played two Previn works as encores. She dedicated them to him — “wherever he is now,” she said with a spiraling gesture taking in the air around and above her.

[Hear the many facets of Mr. Previn, a musical polymath.]

Ms. Mutter has built her career on a rich, glossy tone and glamorous stage presence. She is one of the few violinists who can pull off solo recitals in Carnegie’s big hall. On this occasion, she used her magnetism to draw listeners into a world of sounds that included pallid, watery tones a mere whisper away from silence.

Most surprising, perhaps, she used these spectral colors in the opening work, Mozart’s Violin Sonata in E minor (K. 304), where the opening theme took on brittle weariness. In the second movement, she rendered one ostensibly sunny theme with such spidery lightness that the consolation it offered came across as a mere mirage.

In Debussy’s Violin Sonata, such disembodied sounds are written into the score by a composer who plays on fluctuations of heat and density. In this elegant and sensuous music, Ms. Mutter showed off her trademark rich tone and flamboyant expressiveness.

A second Mozart sonata, in B flat (K. 454), became a vehicle for spirited and flirtatious playing, as did the debonair and witty Violin Sonata of Poulenc. Both works trick the listener with wait-for-it endings. After more than 25 years playing together, Ms. Mutter and Mr. Orkis have their comic timing down pat.

Humor, alienation and hallucinatory echoes of past music come together in Mr. Currier’s “Ghost Trio.” In nine succinct movements, with titles like “Remote,” “Mysterious” and “Forceful,” this work weaves glancing — and distorted — references to piano trios by Beethoven, Mendelssohn and others into his own intricate, emotionally focused language. In duet with Ms. Mutter, Mr. Orkis’s playing is unfailingly attentive. Here his technical brilliance came to the forefront while Daniel Müller-Schott’s buttery cello added depth and contour.

Continue reading…

A concert that lives up to its promise: Trifonov rules at NSO

The Washington Post

By Anne Midgette

It’s nice when a concert feels like an event: the crowded hall, the sense of anticipation. It’s also nice when it lives up to its promise. Audience members came for Daniil Trifonov, the hipster poet of the piano, who caressed the keys until they yielded music that was like a sinuous being of its own. They stayed — the ones who did stay — for rich and vivid Shostakovich, played by the National Symphony Orchestra and conductor Gianandrea Noseda without any soloist.

We’re not used to seeing the Kennedy Center Concert Hall this full. But Trifonov, just shy of 28, is the latest piano phenomenon, the don’t-miss-him musician of the moment. This was his third appearance with the NSO. Though he won the Tchaikovsky Competition in 2011 and has been something of a Wunderkind ever since, he seems to have reached a new level of stardom.

He also, to judge by his performance of Beethoven’s “Emperor” concerto, has reached a new level of maturity. That may be a facile judgment to pass on someone whose performances have aroused so much passion in the hearts of piano lovers for years, and who has had such a recognizable style since his first appearance in the D.C. area eight years ago: a fluid, gentle, romantic touch, and the gleeful and almost wanton accretion of rapid notes that evoke something greedy in their abundance and delight. But on Thursday, he seemed to have shifted into an even higher gear, communicating ease, delight and dreamy intoxication without ever loosening his hold or making a false step. The 35-minute piece flew by, without bombast from soloist or supportive orchestra, which Noseda kept low and light, and Trifonov kept finding ways to make this music seem like something entirely new, a mercurial entity enticing listeners along, through the extended dreamscape of the second movement to the moment, at its end, when he groped his way toward wakefulness before plunging into the new day of the third. He followed up with an encore that sounded like Beethoven, but with a twist — a twist that lay entirely in his rapid-fire performance of it, which made it sound exposed and breathless and new. It was the finale of Beethoven’s 18th Piano Sonata.

Beethoven is something of a calling card for Noseda, who gained his first burst of sustained international attention with a BBC Philharmonic recording of the symphony cycle that set records for downloads at the time. On Thursday, he showed the restraint and fluidity of his best work, an instinct for lightness and crispness that the orchestra more or less followed, more or less dutifully. What woke it up, it turned out, was not Trifonov, but Dmitri Shostakovich. Although many years have passed since Mstislav Rostropovich recorded Shostakovich symphonies with the NSO, some of his passion for this repertoire remains in the group’s genetic code, and Noseda, whose first major post was a long-term training session as principal guest conductor of the Mariinsky Theatre under Valery Gergiev, is equally on home turf. 

Continue reading…

Blood-and-guts singing dominates Met ‘Adriana’ — and Netrebko was good, too.

The Washington Post

By Anne Midgette

After years of aspiring to stake out the terrain of edgy, hip opera, the Metropolitan Opera seems to be having a season of retrenchment. In November, the company replaced Willy Decker’s modernistic giant-clock production of Verdi’s “La Traviata” with an inoffensive and more conventional rehashing by Michael Mayer. On New Year’s Eve, there followed “Adriana Lecouvreur,” a verismo warhorse by Francesco Cilea that’s well known as a vehicle for leading sopranos — in this case Anna Netrebko, today’s reigning diva, in a production by David McVicar that managed, with its busy sets of backstage at the Comédie-Française and aristocratic salons, to make the Met’s vast stage seem crowded.

No one is going to make great claims for the artistic depth of “Adriana,” beyond the repeated assertion that the soprano’s death is one of the most ludicrous in all of opera — a high bar, for sure (she smells or touches poisoned violets she believes are from her beloved Maurizio but are really from her rival). What you need to make it work is good singing — another high bar — and to judge from the performance on Friday, the second of the run, the Met delivered that. Indeed, the company pulled out the stops to such a degree that the real showstopper was not Netrebko, fine as she often was, but the mezzo-
soprano Anita Rachvelishvili as Adriana’s rival and poisoner, the Princess of Bouillon, singing with an old-school blood-and-guts approach in a voice several sizes larger than that of anyone else onstage, to the loud delight of the audience.

Underpinning the evening’s musical strength was Gianandrea Noseda, the music director of the National Symphony Orchestra, who continues to burnish his stature as a darling of the international music world. “Adriana” is a walk in the park for Noseda, who is a veteran opera conductor, a native Italian and an old friend and colleague of Netrebko, since they both got their professional starts at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, where he was for 10 years principal guest conductor. Still, he had his hands full keeping her and the rest of the robust ensemble in line with a score that is often intensely busy while remaining centered around a couple of strong themes — the “I am a servant to my art” theme, the “we are SO in love” theme — that keep announcing themselves with soap-opera-like dependability at the emotional high points.

Continue reading….

Met Opera’s ‘Adriana Lecouvreur’ Bristles With Passion and Danger

The New York Times

By Anthony Tommasini

Backstage at the Comédie-Française in the Paris of 1730, the title character of Francesco Cilea’s “Adriana Lecouvreur,” a leading actress with the company, demurs when hailed by a prince and an abbé as a muse, a goddess, a siren.

No, Adriana answers in the short, soaring aria “Io son l’umile ancella.” She is a humble maidservant of the creative spirit who provides the words, the delicate instrument that serves the creator’s hand.

Actually, Cilea created this 1902 opera as a surefire vehicle for a prima donna, so it’s always hard to take Adriana’s words seriously when a soprano sings them. But on Monday at the Metropolitan Opera’s New Year’s Eve gala premiere of a new production of “Adriana,” Anna Netrebko turned this aria into the aching expression of a woman who triumphs on the stage but muddles through life.

When we meet her she is hopelessly in love with a dashing young man, Maurizio, whom she believes to be an ensign to a count. (He actually is the Count of Saxony.) But even before we see the lovers together, Ms. Netrebko, for all the charisma and allure she conveyed with her glamorous presence and her plush, intensely beautiful singing, suggested how uncertain Adriana feels. Emphasizing three crucial words, she sang that her life is quiet, happy and terrible. Terrible? Yes, in a way. You believed that this artist, who constantly recreates herself in public, would in life be all too vulnerable to the jealousies of rivals, the fawning of admirers, and the passions of a hotheaded, prevaricating young man.

Also, the truth is that for all the lyrical richness, melodramatic fervor and stylish evocations of Parisian courtly and theatrical life in 1730, this opera, the only one by Cilea that turns up now and then in production, needs all the help it can get from artists of Ms. Netrebko’s stature. It’s a good and effective, but not great, work. The light touch that Cilea brings to bear, while preventing the drama from slipping into mawkish excess, sometimes feels musically thin.

“Adriana” must have a superior cast and conductor to succeed. The Met is providing that and more with this David McVicar staging, which replaces the musty 1963 production created for Renata Tebaldi. The tenor Piotr Beczala, singing with youthful fervor, ardent lyricism and clarion top notes, is ideal as the impetuous Maurizio. While suggesting how smitten he is by Adriana, he comes across as a young man on the move. With his royal position looking risky, he proves himself through military exploits. But we learn that he is also disentangling himself from an advantageous liaison with the married Princess of Bouillon, who refuses to let him go.

As the princess, the mezzo-soprano Anita Rachvelishvili, who almost stole the show singing Amneris to Ms. Netrebko’s Aida this fall, was again stupendous. She sang with unforced power and rich colorings throughout the wide range of her voice, from chesty low tones to gleaming top notes. Yet in conveying this imposing princess’s inner emotional fragility, Ms. Rachvelishvili shaped crucial phrases with supple, yearning tenderness. For all the convoluted strands of this story, “Adriana” is at its core a torturous love triangle. Ms. Netrebko, Mr. Beczala and Ms. Rachvelishvili claimed those roles so tenaciously that the drama bristled with passion and danger.

That these performances made “Adriana” seem more musically substantial than usual was also thanks to the insightful conducting of Gianandrea Noseda. Cilea emerged during a period in Italian opera, dominated by Puccini, when the public could not get enough of hot-blooded, verismo (essentially true to life) music dramas. When it comes to harmonic daring and subtle manipulations of melodic motifs, Cilea was no Puccini. But without pumping up or milking the music in any way, Mr. Noseda led a vigorous, exacting and pulsing performance, drawing out inner details and lending lightness, with a mordant touch, to the many scenes of backstage bustle and frivolity at the company where Adriana is a star.

Continue reading…

The 25 Best Classical Music Tracks of 2018

The New York Times

By David Allen

Beethoven: Symphony No. 3, Funeral March

Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra; Manfred Honeck, conductor (Reference)

The most interesting and innovative Beethoven recording since these forces set down the Fifth and Seventh, this intense “Eroica” nods in the direction of tradition but sounds completely new, rethought from the ground up. Just listen as the horns break through the funeral march, at once a pained outburst of grief and a call to greater things. 

Continue reading….

Apollo’s Fire receives Grammy Award nomination for ‘Songs of Orpheus’

The Plain Dealer

By Zachary Lewis

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Cleveland’s baroque orchestra has been nominated for a 2019 Grammy Award.

On Friday, nominations for the 61st annual Grammy Awards were released, and on the list was “Songs of Orpheus,” a recent recording by tenor Karim Sulayman with Apollo’s Fire and conductor Jeannette Sorrell.

“I am beyond thrilled that my debut solo album was recognized in this way," Sulayan said via e-mail. "It’s wonderful to share this honor with such a special group of musicians.”

The album, released by Avie Records in April and featuring music by Monteverdi, Caccini, and others, was nominated in the Best Classical Solo Voice category. It is the first recording by Apollo’s Fire to receive a Grammy nomination.

The recording, produced locally by Erica Brenner, was inspired by the legend of Orpheus, the mythological poet-musician who attempts to retrieve his beloved Eurydice from Hades.

The character was famously depicted by Monteverdi in the opera, “L’Orfeo.” Apollo’s Fire presented a new production of that operastarring Sulayman in April, around the time of the album’s release.

“It’s a program on which I spent a great deal of time and conceived with a lot of love and care, so this kind of recognition is incredibly meaningful,” Sulayman said. “And I was so happy to perform and record it with Apollo’s Fire, with whom I have always loved working.”

Continue reading…