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.
Congratulations to composer, pianist, and singer Gabriel Kahane, a recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Charles Ives Fellowship. Kahane is one of eighteen recipients of the Academy's 2021 music awards. Harmony Ives, the widow of Charles Ives, bequeathed to the Academy the royalties of Charles Ives’s music, which has enabled the Academy to give awards in composition since 1970, including two Charles Ives Fellowships of $15,000 each.
In this Meany On Screen Creative Process Conversation, Circa's Artistic Director, Yaron Lifschitz discusses the creative process, interdependence and art in a time of uncertainty.
In this Meany On Screen Creative Process Conversation, Jeremy Denk discusses his latest book and shares his experience of the creative process with Meany Center Artistic and Executive Director Michelle Witt.
