Posts Tagged ‘Olivier Messiaen’
Magnificent Account of Shostakovich Piano Trio Crowns SummerFest ‘Unsilenced Voices’ Concert
With the exception of Dmitri Shostakovich’s stark Piano Trio No. 2 in E Minor, Friday’s SummerFest program offered a stimulating variety of music outside of the standard repertory.
Read MoreRafael Payare and Steven Schick Present an Online Kaleidoscope of Morning Music from the Rady Shell
San Diego Symphony Music Director Rafael Payare and UC San Diego composer-conductor Steven Schick have assembled three online concerts under the highly programmatic title “To The Earth,” which opened Friday with the first installment, “Morning: Birds and Light.”
Read MoreBach Collegium San Diego Brings Distler’s Mystical ‘Totentanz’ to San Diego
A late medieval meditation on life’s fragility, called the Dance of Death, stimulated the imagination of painters more than musicians. It was such a gloriously macabre 15th-century painting in Lübeck, Germany, by Bernt Notke—Death summoning folks from every station and walk of life—that inspired Hugo Distler’s 1934 choral work Totentanz (Dance of Death). Ruben Valenzuela’s…
Read MoreA Spiritual Journey With Messiaen As Guide
Among the few pivotal works of chamber music from the first half of the last century, nothing touches Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” for its combination of radical technique and sumptuous beauty. Written under grim conditions—in 1941 the composer was a prisoner-of-war in a German stalag near Dresden—it is nevertheless an audacious…
Read MoreYo-Yo Ma Packs Copley Symphony Hall
Cellist Yo-Yo Ma is not simply a virtuoso cellist—he is a celebrity equally at home performing concertos with major orchestras as he is appearing on television or recording sound tracks for blockbuster films. His Wednesday (March 12) recital with pianist Kathryn Stott drew an overflow crowd and offered an eclectic array of classical and popular music . . .
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