|
COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Concert life in New York has never been more vigorous than it is right now. Or so it seemed during a sustained delirium of musical events in late January and early February. The Berlin Philharmonic, under Simon Rattle, brought its dark-gold sound to Carnegie Hall, in four programs touching on four centuries; Mozart was celebrated on the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of his birth. Lincoln Center brought in John Eliot Gardiner to conduct Mozart Masses and symphonies, but it gave more attention to a not-at-all-dead composer, the impossibly vibrant Osvaldo Golijov, whose flamenco opera "Ainadamar" and pan-Iberian song cycle "Ayre" played to sold-out halls. The Juilliard School, in its annual Focus! Festival, presented six evenings of works written in 2005, including Donald Martino's Fifth String Quartet, a valedictory tour de force in high-modern style (the composer died in December), and Mason Bates's "Digital Loom," for organ and electronics, which transformed the hall into something between a decaying cathedral and an East Berlin club. At one point, determined not to be defeated by the surfeit, I made an early exit from a fabulously murderous twentieth-century program by James Levine and the Met Orchestra--Bartok's "Miraculous Mandarin," Schoenberg's "Erwartung," Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring"--to catch a program of Renaissance polyphony by the Hilliard Ensemble, in the Music Before...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
