Criticultura em Portugal

 I just returned from a musical journey in Germany and Austria, starting in Berlin and ending in Vienna, seeing three symphonic concerts and two operas over one week. I'll review the operas next week, but will start with the symphonies. My satisfaction with these concerts did not align with my a priori expectations. This is a good thing, and one reason why it is fun to see live music. Otherwise, you could just sit at home with your perfect digital performances.  First up was the Berlin Philharmonic playing in their home Philharmonie under guest conductor Andris Nelsons, the Latvian maestro who heads both the Boston Symphony and Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestras. The orchestra sounded as great as expected, with particularly delicious woodwind solos in the Beethoven Fourth Symphony. This is not a titanic piece, but Nelsons and the orchestra performed it with a nice mix of virtuosity and classical restraint. Less interesting were the Richard Strauss tone poem Don Juan  and the c...

Portugal's classical scene feature many typical holiday concerts, including those with too-familiar repertory (eg Sleighride, Nutcracker). Compared to the USA there are fewer Messiah s, but more Bach Christmas Oratorio s, as in most of Europe. Last weekend I saw two very non-typical holiday concerts that should have made a nice pair. The Austrian organist-composer Anton Bruckner (1824-1896) started neurotically laboring over his 10 published massive symphonies late in life (mostly after age 50) and was heavily influenced by his contemporaries Brahms and Wagner. In many ways his symphonies synthesize the music of both. So I looked forward to hearing two concerts the same day featuring these three composers.  First, the good. The Orquestra Metropolitana de Lisboa (OML) performed a free concert of the Bruckner Symphony No. 7 in E major in the gorgeous Basílica da Estrela (see below). It was exciting to see a Bruckner concert with people lined up outside in the rain one hour in advance...

On a recent trip to New York City, I sampled some current theater, both on- and off-Broadway. Off-Broadway theater has been very slow to recover post-COVID, as attendance has dropped, key personnel left the city, and some companies lost their lease at small theaters. Historically, the New Group has been among the healthiest of these smaller companies, often featuring established stars performing in unusual, or self-written plays. On this visit I saw Sabbath’s Theater , a theatrical reworking of Philip Roth’s novel of the same name, starring (and co-written by) John Turturro, film and stage star of Quiz Show, Severance, and Barton Fink . It’s centered on a horny 64-year-old ex-puppeteer who beds numerous women and has an existential crisis. I like Roth better when he does not obsess on the theme of oversexed middle aged men. While this is not one of my favorite Roth novels, I looked forward to seeing what a theatrical rewrite could do with it. Not much, it turns out. This play was unfa...

 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...

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...