In the News

We went to see Midori the other night at a rehearsal of the Marin Symphony Orchestra, which was preparing for a series of weekend concerts. The rehearsal was focused on Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto No. 1.

The first time Jonathan Biss asked for piano lessons, he was 4. His musician parents said he was too young, but he kept asking.

"There was music everywhere when I was growing up," recalls Biss, who soon enough played piano at home alongside his mother, violinist Miriam Fried, and his father, violist-violinist Paul Biss. "As I got older, it became clear that music would be my profession. I perceived music as a language and a totally natural form of communication."

On Wednesday night at Symphony Hall, pianist Jonathan Bissperformed the first of his highly anticipated recitals of the complete cycle of all 32 of Beethoven’s piano sonatas over the course of two seasons. Biss selected five for this first outing: Nos. 1, 9, 12, 13 and 21; their dates of completion span from 1795 to 1804 and represent Beethoven’s earliest published work in the genre to the beginnings of his middle or “heroic” stylistic period.

Where to open a programme largely connected to Vienna, that hothouse in which so much piano music has been composed? Jonathan Biss’s solution, in his recital as part of the Southbank Centre’s International Piano Series, was to plunge right into the maelstrom that is Berg’s Op. 1 Sonata, a single movement evoking all the musical tensions of early 20th-century Vienna.

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s classic silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc has been paired with music from J.S. Bach to Nick Cave, yet, until now, never music that would have been common at the time. The Orlando Consort has thus applied its expertise in the music of the early 15th century to create something that complements the aesthetic impact of the film and augments its attention to historical accuracy.

Donald Greig of the Orlando Consort, like so many others, hasn’t been able to get La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc) out of his mind. The 1928 film, a silent-movie masterwork directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer and featuring Renée Maria Falconetti in her one and only movie appearance, is filmed entirely in close-up and medium shots.

Donald Greig takes up the challenge of live-scoring The Passion of Joan of Arc, using vocal and choral music of Joan’s era in climactic combination

The frigid cold may have kept some listeners home, but it did not deter the Jerusalem Quartet from playing at Shriver Hall on Sunday evening. The ensemble arrived in Baltimore only a short time before the concert was scheduled to begin, because of weather-related flight troubles, and the cellist, whose suitcase was lost, wore jeans — but when they played, all such cares were forgotten.

The Jerusalem Quartet made its Seattle debut Thursday night with a reputation as one of the more stellar groups to have emerged in the past couple of decades. It’s safe to say the quartet lived up to its accolades.

A good string quartet, wisdom has it, is like a single instrument with 16 strings. That sort of unity of sound and purpose is a given in any performance by the extraordinary Jerusalem Quartet, which on Thursday completed the opening leg of a marathon in which it will play all six Bartok quartets and the first six quartets by Beethoven within a single week at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. But during the Andante of Bartok’s Quartet No.