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Bob Hicks (a.k.a. Mr. Scatter) has a review of the Oregon Ballet Theater’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which featured the return of the OBT orchestra after being absent due to budget cuts for all of the 2009-2010 season. Here’s the portion of the review that deals with the orchestra:
Welcome back, orchestra.
After an elegant, [...]
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Peggy Swafford, former violist with the Oregon Symphony and forever a Finn, sent me this poetic review of Sunday night’s performance – enjoy!
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In case you’ve missed it in your day’s rounds of the internet, Jon Kimura Parker, soloist with the orchestra last week in the Brahms d minor piano concerto, responded to David Stabler’s review (a markedly negative one) of the performance:
We live in a fascinating time where reviewers cannot hide behind their newspapers as in days [...]
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The OSO’s music director Carlos Kalmar has demonstrated an affinity for the music of Gustav Mahler throughout his tenure with the orchestra, usually opening or closing a season with a major work of the Austrian composer. This year, at his other gig, Kalmar began the home stretch of the season of the Grant Park Music [...]
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[click photo to enlarge]
After reading this extraordinary review of the new pianist phenom Yuja Wang with the San Francisco Symphony, I now am fairly desperate to see her in performance. I hope that we can get her for an OSO series in an upcoming season. I’d heard rumors that she was like Lang Lang but [...]
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Steve Smith, music editor for Time Out New York and a freelance reviewer who often writes classical music reviews for the New York Times, writes about his review of the Gilbert Kaplan led performance of Mahler 2 with the New York Philharmonic here. Interesting reading, and it shows how critical a missing sentence can be [...]
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I think it would be safe to say that Lang Lang’s Portland Oregon Symphony debut was a triumph. The roar that came from the sold-out crowd at the Schnitz at the conclusion of the Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto was well nigh deafening, such was the response from the audience. I can’t say that I’ve ever [...]
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OK, the holiday weekend is over, a (slight) chance to relax was had, and now it’s time to take a retrospective look back at the 2007-2008 season from the point of view of an on stage musician.
Overall, my major impression from the season is that I had to learn quite a bit of unfamiliar music. [...]
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This past Friday, the St. Louis area was awakened by the shaking of a 5.2 magnitude earthquake. That evening the St. Louis Symphony was led by OSO music director Carlos Kalmar in a performance that included the Fifth Symphony of Sergei Prokofiev. According to this review and other accounts, this may have been an aftershock [...]
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Joshua Bell
Photo credit: Bill Phelps
Pianist/blogger Jeremy Denk made a big splash last year with what I’m told was a stunning performance of Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata. Violinist Joshua Bell will highlight the Oregon Symphony’s 2008-2009 season playing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. Here’s a very positive review of their recent Carnegie Hall performance.
Jeremy Denk
Photo [...]
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This is the review that did it for me – New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini fairly wetting himself over the Philharmonic debut of conductor it-boy of this decade, Gustavo Dudamel.
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Whenever you get a guest conductor back after a year’s absence or more, it’s often a good time to take stock of where the orchestra is at artistically, where the guest conductor is artistically, and what sort of trends you can divine from these observations. When the guest conductor is a former music director, [...]
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