Criticultura em Portugal

In Portugal holiday music is not necessarily linked to the English-German-US canon of Messiah  and caroling. Most professional performing organizations do a big concert, but the pieces performed are usually not from a uniform playbook related to Christmas. Of course, local community choirs are heard around town performing Portuguese (and other) Christmas songs, and caroling occurs, if not as much as in the US and UK.  Over the recent holiday period I heard two choral and one orchestral concert around Lisbon. The best of these was the New Year's Eve concert of the Gulbenkian Choir, founded in 1964 and usually considered the best professional chorus in the area. This year's concert was entertaining and well performed, and was held in the wonderfully ornate Church of São Roque, the earliest extant Jesuit church in Portugal (late 17th century). This is one of the few churches to survive the massive 1755 earthquake and pairs a gaudy Baroque interior with a plain rectangular archite...

 I recently saw a play ( Our Town  on Broadway) and a film ( Challengers ) that made me think about how narrative sequence plays into dramatic urgency and character development.  Thornton Wilder's Our Town  won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1938, along with wide admiration for its stripped-down, innovative "modern" structure (e.g. Edward Albee called it the greatest American play). I mostly know it as a vehicle for high school and community theater, perhaps because of its immediacy, simple prose, and many characters, offering community troupes lots of participation. Oddly, this lauded Broadway production was my first exposure to it. The play depicts the life (from childhood to death) of members of the town of Grover's Corners New Hampshire. His three acts (Daily Life, Lover and  Marriage, Death and Eternity) do not mess with time sequence, and lay out a very linear chronology, mostly following on the young couple Emily and George. We see a series of snapshots ...

 I was in NYC for a few days at Thanksgiving. The highlight was playing some excellent chamber music with some friends, but I also attended some interesting music events.  The outstanding Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra played in Carnegie Hall under its new 28-year-old Finnish wunderkind conductor Klaus Mäkelä. He has been the subject of much dishy scrutiny and discussion in the classical music world: for his nascent music directorships of three of the world's best orchestras (Amsterdam, Chicago, Paris), his svelte good looks, and for his dating the charismatic and hot pianist Yuja Wang.  I hand not heard him before. Is the hype warranted? Based on this high-profile concert, yes and no. His greatest virtue was a strong sense of sonority, color and timbre. He drew lush sounds out of the strings for Arnold Schoenberg's 1899 Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night). .  This piece of post-romanticism (or pre modernism) was originally for string sextet, but is often done, ...

It's been since late summer that I blogged, mainly because of lots of travel.  Let's catch up a bit.  While on a summer hiking trip to the Canadian Rockies and the Galapagos, I had a chance to spend a few days in Quito, the high-elevation (9000 foot) capital of Ecuador. It's well worth a visit for its fascinating mixed cultures of Spain and  indigina  peoples, as well as the steeply sloped and well-preserved colonial heart of the city. Quito is replete with fantastically baroque gilded churches put up by the Jesuits and others, unfortunately at the expense of the locals that they conquered.  In early November I ventured to northern England to play in concerts of the European Doctors' Orchestra, an engaging and talented group of amateurs. We played music of Ravel, Gershwin, and Copland in the uber-modern Newcastle Glasshouse International Centre for Music, perched like spaceship above the River Tyne.  Newcastle is a nice example of how declining industrial c...

 A benefit of living in Europe is being able to duck in on a variety of big musical events when I go sightseeing. In the past couple months two such experiences proved particularly memorable.  In London I saw Swan Lake at the Royal Ballet in Covent Garden. As one would expect from this august company, the solo and corps dancing was superb and expressive. The sets were a bit musty and dowdy-appearing, even though designed during this century. The true star, though, was Tchaikovsky's dazzling ballet score. If Mozart was at heart a great opera composer, Tchaikovsky was at the core a top dance composer. It's in his ballet scores, esp. Swan Lake and  Nutcracker, that we can best hear his varied orchestration and relentless forward motion and pulse, essential in the dance. In this Swan Lake  the two principal soloists, Fumi Kaneko as Odette/Odile and Vadim Muntagirov as Prince Siegfried, acted and danced beautifully. They even made the confusing ending of the ballet work. ...