In the News

In modern popular music, "sampling" is a common technique, taking an excerpt or element of an earlier song and transforming it into something new. This idea, in fact, dates centuries back.

The Utah Symphony's upcoming O.C. Tanner Masterworks Series program offers prime examples of musical tributes-or, what could be considered sampling in symphonic music. The concerts take place September 24 and 25 at Abravanel Hall, and the public is also invited to a ticketed dress rehearsal on the morning of September 24 to witness the artistic process of refining a performance.

George Li's profile has skyrocketed through the rankings of classical pianists in recent years. He has racked up prominent competition successes, most notably the Silver Medal at the 2015 Tchaikovsky International Competition. He's still only 25 years old, but he's already played alongside many of the world's most prominent conductors and orchestras in concerto settings. His recording contract with Warner Classics has yielded two highly praised albums.

A few bumps are inevitable on the Utah Symphony’s road back to normalcy. At last week’s opening program, illness led to two changes of conductors and a programming adjustment.

This week, Ludovic Morlot was on the podium replacing Thierry Fischer due to the music director’s recent hospitalization. Also George Li was the substitute pianist in place of Andrei Korobeinikov, who was sidelined by a pandemic-related visa delay.

This is one resilient residency. Last winter, the Schubert Club announced that chamber music's first couple, cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han, would be artists-in-residence this season. It seemed that COVID-19 would scotch those plans, but Finckel and Han kept their commitment to perform a pair of concerts Thursday and Friday.

Few ensembles can induce me to embark on a three-hour round-trip drive, but the Han-Setzer-Finckel Trio absolutely did yesterday.  In Beethoven’s “Ghost” Trio, Op. 70, No. 1, and Dvořák’s “Dumky” Trio, Op. 90 at the Rockport Chamber Music Festival, Wu Han (piano), Philip Setzer (violin) and David Finckel (cello) treated us to a brilliant display of consummate and refined musicianship, down to earth and without pretense. Mere technique became invisible. Not an iota of self-consciousness or of jadedness marred the directness and freshness of their sound.

Most of us have snapshots of ourselves as infants. But pianist Simone Dinnerstein has a different kind of baby picture. Her father, Simon, included her, sitting on her mother's lap, in The Fulbright Triptych, an enormous 14-foot-wide painting.

 ‘Innovatively thematic, masterful and emotional’ might begin to convey the WOW of Simone Dinnerstein’s recital at the Shalin Liu to close out this summer’s treasurable Rockport Chamber Music Festival. From start to finish, the thoughtfully interconnected pieces, reflecting what the pianist called in an interview with Lara Pellegrinelli, “music that returns to itself,” provided much to consider.

Between the interruptions of sleep patterns, worrying for our communities, and the uncertainty of the pandemic, it has been a sleep-deprived 18 months. We’ve all found different ways to cope with the situation.

Two leading contemporary chamber ensembles join forces for an absorbing program highlighting the experience of migration. Transforming ancestral stories into music, the Catalyst Quartet and Imani Winds perform “(im)migration: music of change” at the Moss Arts Center on Thursday, Oct. 28, at 7:30 p.m.

Many modern operas, theater pieces, and song cycles view current social problems and events through overly artsy and/or abstracted lenses that blur the impact of what their creators may want to say.