Criticultura em Portugal

This season's first concert of Lisbon's Gulbenkian Orchestra was an odd but interesting choice for a season opener. It featured two "difficult" works, Mahler's Symphony No. 7 (1905) and Geörgy Ligeti's Lux Aeterna for 16 part a cappella choir (1966), I liked the pairing. The opening Ligeti piece (familiar to many from its futuristic use in 2001 A Space Odyssey ) is short, quiet, and atmospheric, made of many overlapping dissonances. It's very hard to sing (I performed it 15 years ago in the US), as you often have to come in solo on a long, exposed, high note, exactly matching the pitch of another singer who came in on the same note a bit earlier. So any hesitancy or inaccuracy is obvious. The Gulbenkian choir performed it well, with only a few soprano and tenor high A's entering shakily. The piece was performed in front of a black curtain behind the orchestra, with the invisible orchestra in the dark. This staging effectively set a nocturnal, spooky m

The final faculty concert of the summer workshop  Ver ão Clássico was performed on 29 July in the resplendent Coach Museum in Belém. As in the last concert I saw there, the performance standards were very high, with spirited performances of varied pieces, some quite unfamiliar to me.  The opening Beethoven Piano Trio in E flat , Opus 1/1 was composed in 1795 when the composer was in his early 20's, and is among his earliest published works. During this period he was mostly known as a piano virtuoso, but was already studying composition with Haydn and Salieri. He was also avidly studying the works of Mozart, who had recently died. The piano trio reflects his studies, and sounds quite Mozartian, with charming melodies and a lighter more purely classical texture than Beethoven would develop in the coming years. There is not much of the later Beethoven to be heard, but the piano part is quite virtuosic, and was superbly played here by the Ukrainian pianist Milana Chernyavska.  The 1910

As part of the summer workshop for young musicians Ver ão Clássico, members of the international professional faculty present four concerts, this year all of them in the acoustically and visually beautiful Coach Museum Hall. The initial concert on July 18 apparently had to be reconfigured at the last moment because of the illness of the featured soprano soloist. Inserted instead were the early Mahler Piano Quartet and a Richard Strauss song for soprano Ana-Camelia Stefanescu. The benefit of this reconfiguration was ending the concert with the magnificent Schumann Piano Quintet , one of the best chamber pieces in the literature. Overall, the concert was beautifully performed and invigorating. The Mahler Piano Quartet is a rarity, composed when he was only 15-16 and still finding his way. There are bits of Brahms and Liszt audible, and a couple passages reminiscent of the later symphonies, but mostly some nice undifferentiated romantic music by an avid student studying the masters for i

The Sintra Festival is an annual two week event that hosts diverse concerts, many in historic venues around Lisbon and nearby Sintra. There is poetry, large and small ensembles, even an all Rachmaninoff accordion (!) concert.  I attended the opening concert featuring intriguing lesser-known baroque music from the early 18th C, performed by the Portuguese early music ensemble Ensemble Bonne Corde. The concert was held in the Throne Room of the National Palace at Queluz, northwest of Lisbon, and was entitled "Funchal in London: Concerti Grossi by Ant ónio Pereira da Costa". The main focus of the concert was performances of three concerti grossi by da Costa (1697-1770), kapellmeister of the Cathedral of Funchal on the island of Madeira. Apparently these are the only known Portuguese concerti grossi, a musical form very popular in Italy in the early 18th century. A concerto grosso alternates solos or small ensembles with tutti sections involving the whole orchestra...think of Bac

After moving to Portugal, I wondered what I would need to do to see English language theater, other than fly to London. Well, it turns out that there are at least a couple of good English language troops in Lisbon, mostly featuring Portuguese actors who are fluent in English. I saw one doing Sartre’s Huis Clos ( aka No Exit) last week. I vaguely remember reading this play in college, mostly as an example of existential philosophy. So I was expecting some tough, dense sledding. Not so! Done in an updated translation that included modern social references (social media, WiFi, etc), this was a very accessible play, not at all heavily philosophical. The crisp direction and three talented young actors created a lively evening that never lagged or became enmeshed in philosophic navel-gazing. The play, depicting three recent arrivals in hell, was performed in a dingy, deconstructed small classroom in the dark, gloomy National Museum of Natural History and Science in Lisbon. You had to walk