Criticultura em Portugal

As I sat down for Sunday's excellent concert by the French ensemble Quatour B éla , I got nervous. T he audience of 500 or so contained lots of families, including kids under 12. Did they know what they were getting into? Two quartets by Geörgi Ligeti (1923-2006), plus another by his quirky US contemporary Conlon Nancarrow (1923-1997). My experience in the USA with kids attending “difficult” concerts has generally been poor, and I worried about squirming and chatter disrupting what I know would be some very soft dynamics. Not to worry! Behind me, a 12-year-old was chatting with his father, bilingually dropping the names Chomsky, Mahler, and Bartok. The audience was eerily quiet and raptly attentive throughout the 1 hour concert. Apparently, I had wandered into a big Lisbon intellectual family outing! We all saw a great concert by a quartet that has been together 17 years, specializing in contemporary music. They often collaborate with folk, pop, and ethnic musicians, rather like th

The Lisbon Metropolitan Orchestra opened its season Sunday night with a high-quality performance featuring the little-played First Symphony (C minor, op. 11) of Mendelssohn (1809-1849), written when he was 15 years old. This was written just after he had written the 13 string symphonies, and one year before the masterful Octet for strings. This teenager had obviously been honing his craft amidst intense study of past composers, esp. Bach. The symphony is written for strings plus paired woodwinds, trumpets, and horns. The amazing thing about this early work is how complete and polished each of the four  movements are. Most romantic symphonies have at least one dull or filler movement. Not here. The finale may go on just a bit long, but Mendelssohn just had to insert two (not one) iterations of a fugue, reflecting the influence of Bach on the young composer. Conductor Pedro Neves, conducting without a baton,  drew forth a crisp, well articulated performance from the orchestra, never let