Criticultura em Portugal

 On my recent trip to NYC I caught a performance of Florencia en el Amazonas , a 1996 opera by Mexican composer Daniel Catán. This was the first Mexican opera performed at the Met, and was part of an admirable effort to go beyond the standard repertory (eg the recent Fire Shut Up My Bones  and The History of Malcolm X ). But they have to do better than this tepid rehash of Puccini. This composer clearly loves the postromantic style of the Italian, but lacks his gift for transcendent melody. So the opera came across as overly sweetened weak tea, as a  La Boheme  clone with mosquitos.  The opera focuses on Florencia Grimaldi, a soprano diva traveling up the Amazon river on the way to an operatic engagement at the opera house at Manaus, Brazil. On the way, Florencia (well sung by the soprano Ailyn Pérez) swoons and pines over he lost love, the butterfly hunter Cristóbal, who has vanished into the Amazon forest. From the first bars, it sounds like a B- version of  La Boheme, beginning wit

I recently enjoyed two recent concerts by Lisbon-area chamber orchestras, i.e. the Orquestra Metropolitana de Lisboa (OML) and the Orquestra de Câmara de Cascais e Oeiras (OCCO). The repertoire of these concerts roughly spanned Beethoven’s lifespan, (the classical to early romantic eras), and provided an entertaining overview of how classical music developed between 1770 and 1830. OML’s concert in the large concert hall in Belém began with two early Classical works of Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805). The 26 th symphony (1788) was a peppy Italianate piece without much depth. His ninth cello concerto (ca 1770) showcased the excellent young Austrian cellist Julia Hagen. Boccherini was a cello virtuoso who expanded cello technique, especially extending the instrument’s range to very high notes, often in the range of the violin. This concerto featured that extended technique. It’s a bit old-fashioned compared to the contemporaneous mature concerti of Mozart, since the cello played exclusive

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

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