The medieval era was very much about church music, partially because that's where a lot of the creativity was happening, and partially because the church was the primary institution, along with universities, dedicated to writing things down.
The album, appropriately entitled Hoffnung, opens with a nuanced account of the expansive Im Freien. The combination of Hasselhorn's communicative diction and Bushakevitz's poetic phrasing brings a rapt intimacy to this six-minute celebration of nocturnal beauty.
Fast forward a few decades and John Wilson is still hand-picking musicians and still serving up performances so polished they leave critics scrabbling for superlatives. These days Wilson's main outfit is the Sinfonia of London, and he is as likely to be conducting the symphonic mainstream as showtunes.
The Sixth is one of the hardest symphonies to tame. Bychkov leans into the contrasts, the Alma theme glowing with inner fire and a slow movement that shimmers like a limpid Austrian lake.
Glass joined a growing list of performers and artists who have canceled shows and cut ties with the arts center since President Trump replaced its board with people who share his aversion to woke programming, and affixed his name to the facade without congressional or Kennedy family approval. The new board also named Trump as chairman, and, in an unprecedented move, the president hosted this year's Kennedy Center Honors, which garnered its lowest ratings ever when broadcast on CBS. Ticket sales have also tanked.
The Austrian pianist's expressive, emotional playing may grab the headlines, but it's the unerring sense of underlying architecture that's the thread through her long career. We heard that here, not just within each of the works, but in the shared foundations, and sometimes secret connecting passages, she revealed between them.
Upon its debut in 1725, The Four Sea­sons stunned lis­ten­ers by telling a sto­ry with­out the help of a human voice. Vival­di drew on four exist­ing son­nets (pos­si­bly of his own prove­nance), using strings to paint a nar­ra­tive filled with spring thun­der­storms, summer's swel­ter, autum­nal hunts and har­vests, and the icy winds of win­ter. The com­pos­er stud­ded his score with pre­cise­ly placed lines from the son­nets, to con­vey his expec­ta­tions that the musi­cians would use their instru­ments to son­i­cal­ly embody the expe­ri­ences being described.
I was immediately struck by his magnetic intensity, his fierce passion for music and his unique way of speaking English—punctuated by frequent utterances of er-er-er. Many years later, Kurtag was to tell me: 'Stuttering is my natural mode of expression.' He and Marta simply embodied—he still embodies—music. I had never met anyone to whom each note mattered so much.
The sheet is modest in size but immense in significance. Carefully inked across the page are the opening 20 bars of a fugue - not Mozart's own invention, but his transcription of a harpsichord work by George Frideric Handel, composed more than sixty years earlier. Mozart was 26 when he set to work on it in 1782-83, transforming Handel's keyboard fugue into the beginnings of a string quartet arrangement.
I'm a harmonica and accordion player and one half of folk-classical duo Stevens & Pound. As a multi-instrumentalist I am rooted in a folk tradition that is oral, aural and communal. Music and song are passed down by ear, either through recordings or more fun traditional music sessions. Here, players and singers get together to share, swap and play tunes, drawing from a repertoire that is always evolving.
The dancers had been at it for hours. They looked sallow, too tired even to sweat, but Ratmansky was not yet satisfied with what he saw. He asked the rehearsal pianist to play a passage from the score, took a moment to think, then blurted out two phrases of choreography for the dancers. He showed the steps, and they repeated them back. Then he showed them again, illuminating this or that nuance, and they did it again.
