Results tagged “classicalmusic”

Discretion is the dumber part of valor.

Traditionally, an opera is performed with (a) an orchestra, consisting of many different instruments, and (b) tickets, for which you must pay money. Often a good, fancy-dinner-sized chunk of money. So how is OperaHub getting around that for Claudio Monetverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea?

Opera Bedřich Smetana's The Bartered Bride calls for a dude in a bear costume, the most tuneful stuttering you'll ever hear, and the consumption of gallons of imaginary beer. Opera Boston places the 19th-century Czech comic opera in the Depression (the previous one), back when selling women was still hilarious. Pretty singing, with baseball. Cutler Majestic Theatre, 219 Tremont St, 7:30 pm. $29-$114.

Thérèse Raquin has been adapted for the stage before—by Emile Zola himself, and by Harry Connick, Jr., among many others—but the opera being performed at the Boston University Theatre* feels like a movie. Domino players' arms are choreographed like stop-motion puppets and, all around them, the meticulous grime and uncanny colors look post-production. Tobias Picker's displaced film noir score is lush, often frantic, and always on the verge of shrieking—and when it finally does, at the murderous close of the first act, it never quite stops.

      

Spanish Sirens: Ravel's L'Heure Espagnole & Excerpts from Carmen

           

"Virtue" was the theme of last Wednesday's Opera Boston Underground show, and its seven varieties were interpreted with varying degrees of precision by seven young singers. Baritone Graham Wright took a direct route to Courage, "Mut" from Schubert's Winterreise, and Julia Mintzer personified at least three or four virtues all at once, waiting for her husband to return from the Crusades in Henri Duparc's "Au pays ou se fait la guerre." There was lonely tower, a white moon, cooing birds in a willow, but the results of Mintzer's brooding, seductive mezzo were more immediate and vivid than all that. We neglected our Great Pumpkin Ale and allowed our artichoke dip to cool.

7pm, 21+, $10 (no advance tickets, and there's always a line)

A couple of weekends ago, this Bostonist's mom dropped off a children's book, withdrawn from the New Britain Public Library, titled Adventures of Richard Wagner. The mischievous protagonist, "little Dicker," slides down banisters, carries wet puppies in his woolen cap, and hand-copies the score of Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischütz. The last few pages had been pulled out, so who knows how this ends?

            

On Sunday, the Ditson Festival of Contemporary Music's last pair of concerts at the ICA began with two people and finished with over sixty, in a glass box on the harbor. The former were Matt Haimovitz, on cello, and Geoff Burleson, on (and in) piano. Children standing on the postmodern boardwalk outside pressed their faces against the window as Burleson hit keys with one hand and reached in with the other to pluck at the piano's viscera, as Augusta Read Thomas's "Cantos for Slava" (2008) required. When Haimovitz wasn't wringing long, doleful cries from his instrument, he too plucked, as if the cello were a tall, fat lute.

       

Friday night's installment of the Ditson Festival of Contemporary Music was all about text. Whole, grammatical sentences; comprehensible, English, (mostly) well-enunciated; no Italian arias, no liturgical Latin, no repurposed Sanskrit, neither Einstein nor beach—this is not what Bostonist has come to expect from classical music, contemporary or otherwise.

         

"I know people from Vermont are here," Nico Muhly declared. "I can just smell it."

Giuseppe Verdi's rapidly complicated, frequently histrionic, infrequently performed opera Ernani plays like a telenovela on fast-forward with the volume turned up.

In Mozart's delightfully farcical opera Così fan tutte, everyone is culpable. The title—roughly, "They're all like that"—refers to the fickleness of Woman, the hypothetical Fiordiligi and Dorabella in particular (sung by Leah Sapko and Kristina Reagle in Thursday's performance) but their fiancés Ferrando and Guglielmo (David Vogel and Jonathan Nussman) likewise prove themselves to be utter cads in the course of their very complicated attempt to prove the sisters' fidelity.

March 18, 19, and 22 at 8 p.m., $6-$24 (20% discount if purchased through the Juventas web site)

Upstairs was the teeming Cambridge Common; outside, the usual smokers' conversations. "Dude, you spit on my nachos." "No, I spit next to your nachos." And downstairs, Opera Boston Underground had returned to the Lizard Lounge for another well-attended performance.

Gail Mazur, Robert Pinsky, Lloyd Schwartz, and Rosanna Warren will be reading at the ICA on the HarborWalk at 6:30 pm tomorrow, Thursday, May 3. Free first-come, first-serve tickets will be available an hour before the reading. The ICA and UMass Boston are celebrating Emily Dickinson - the ultimate Massachusetts literary institution - tomorrow night. The ICA is installing a visual display of Dickinson's 695 (As if the Sea should part), and four poets will...

If you look past the fact that the Sox are back at home for their first few games at Fenway this season you'll be able to hear a greater beat on the street. As is often the case there is more good live music going on in town this week than any one person could possibly listen to. Time to clone yourself so you can scoop up a standing room ticket to watch Dice-K...

This past September something innovative happened in Boston. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum launched a webcast. It wasn't just any webcast, it was a creative commons licensed release of concerts performed as part of the long standing museum concert series. It's allowed users world wide to take in a little classical music culture by downloading the file and playing it on their iPod, in the windows media center or whatever MP3 compatible device they choose....

Every once in a while a webcast comes around that Bostonist just adores. Of course, we want to share this adoration and what better way to accomplish this than to drop a review on the intertubes for your consumption? This week we review a 'cast that is produced by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: The Concert.

Many a Sunday finds Bostonist somewhat hung-over, looking at a greasy plate of bacon, eggs, and some sort of potato product. By the time brunch has finished we've already missed a great classical music concert at the Isabella Stewart Garner Museum. We feel rewarded when we do end up making it to the ISGM for the Sunday afternoon show. The ISGM offers a whole lot of what those smart folks call "fine art." Today, in a totally hip move, the museum launched a new webcast, The Concert that will let us catch all the classical goodness they offer up on Sundays under a deliciously unrestrictive Creative Commons license letting the sounds be heard and shared. The Concert won't be a replacement for a Sunday afternoon at the ISGM (it really is beautiful if you've never been), but it will allow us to catch up on those we miss, and give us a little culture to drop during a dinner party or an afternoon sitting around blogging.

Bostonist attended a performance of Monsieur Chopin the other night at the A.R.T. in Harvard Square.

Tuesday 5/30

Admittedly we’re a little low on the Saturday evening picks for this week. Mostly because we know we’ll still be swigging green beer by the pint – or at least too hung-over from Friday night to make it out to a show. Again this week we’ve put a little classical music for those of you that feel a little culture is good for the soul. Monday 3/13: Dilated Peoples and Little Brother Rakaa, Evidence...

It certainly is not everyday that Bostonist gets an email with “Hungarian Superstar” and “Big Mamma's House 2 and a bucket of greasy popcorn” discussing the same thing, so today must not be everyday. Tonight Hungarian superstar György Ligeti’s etudes will be performed as part of the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum’s Composer Portraits series. Christopher Taylor from the Miller Theatre in New York will play the African polyrhythmic and Balinese Gamelan inspired compositions.