In the News

A Google search for scores written for one hand alone reveals a considerable repertory for each hand. The best-known works are for the left hand, like the concertos by Ravel and Korngold, composed for the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right arm in World War I. Injury is often a motivating factor behind such compositions; Scriabin wrote for left hand after an injury to his right. Brahms dedicated his transcription for left hand of the Chaconne in D minor (from Bach’s Partita in D minor for solo violin) to Clara Schumann, who had injured her other hand.

Listening to the pianist Jeremy Denk play, you never doubt that he is someone who thinks about music deeply and rather a lot. It’s not that you sense that he fusses overmuch about tempos and dynamics, or that he’s out to demonstrate his awesome cleverness through programming juxtapositions. Rather, what Mr. Denk’s playing conveys most is an inclusive consideration of where each piece came from, what it reflects about its composer and how music connects to a life’s broader concerns.

Denk played the “Goldberg Variations” with an insouciant charm, and also with the sense that every note had been carefully considered: the attack, the separation or the fluid legato of each phrase, the nature of each articulation, the different character of each variation, the tricky crossing of hands, the variety in dynamics. Ornamentation was sparing but effective.

Marc-Andre Hamelin never won the Cleveland International Piano Competition, but he handily won over a portion of its audience Tuesday night at the Cleveland Museum of Art. From a recital organized by the competition, the Canadian pianist emerged brilliantly victorious after repeatedly wowing a crowd of discerning listeners with an eclectic and often fiercely difficult slate of music. He even delivered a bewitching encore: Debussy's "Reflets dans l'eau."

The pianist Marc-André Hamelin once played a piece from Schumann’s “Carnaval” for a friend who was a music lover but “not literate as to the score,” Hamelin said recently from his Boston area home. The piece is called “Chopin” and is often played as a kind of slow reverie, not unlike one of that composer’s nocturnes. When he finished playing it, his friend “thought it was all wrong.”

In a delightfully perverse bit of programming, the esteemed pianist Marc-André Hamelin opened his Carnegie Hall recital on Wednesday evening, after a hero’s welcome from the audience, with Mozart’s unassuming Sonata in C (K. 545) — in the composer’s words, “a little piano sonata for beginners.”

Alsarah is an artist and a participant in the sonic history of music. Born in Khartoum, Sudan, of Nubian descent, she sings of migration, love, and nationhood in both Arabic and Nubian languages, with her band The Nubatones. Their first album, Silt, followed the motif of the Songs of Return, a musical genre inspired by the forced displacement of Nubian peoples due to environmental and political strife. 

When Sudanese singer, songwriter and ethnomusicologist Alsarahperformed in Nairobi together with the great Kombo & Afrosimba earleir this year, we were immediately spellbound by her powerful voice and eclectic mix of north and east African tunes, as well as Arabic sounds and traditions. We are now eagerly awaiting the release of Alsarah & the Nubatones's first full length album later this year, but in the meantime meet Alsarah, the new princess of Nubian pop and Sudanese retro.

The show starts with Lila Downs – resplendent in a flowery yellow dress and a pair of crazily high white heels – opening a bottle of tequila. She pours a drop on the floor (“as is traditional among native American communities in Oaxaca, Mexico, as a show of thanks to Mother Earth”), swigs from it and then passes it around the audience to loud cheers. It’s a triumphant start to a show that never puts a foot wrong.

Bring on the tequila for this one. And imagine the likes of Chavela Vargas and Janis Joplin serenading the women we call las adelitas — the female Mexican revolutionaries — around your table. That's the kind of badassery Lila Downs evokes with "Peligrosa," the lead track to her new album Salón, Lágrimas y Deseo.