Bulgaria's Teatro Lirico d'Europa brought Verdi's Aida to town for three shows at the Cutler Majestic. It's one of TLE's best productions, with colorful and substantial sets that mix Giza, Karnak, and Super Bowl halftime. The chorus was particularly impressive, though the Egyptians seemed to have captured only one Ethiopian. My Aida was glamorous Bolshoi soprano Olga Chernisheva, whom I liked last year as TLE's Tosca, though I thought she sang everything too loud. Perhaps that has done some damage to her voice, which this time was unsettlingly unsteady, and as Verdi's enslaved Ethiopian, she was more cool than vulnerable. In TLE's previous Traviata, I liked Mexican tenor Gabriel González's voice but worried about his pitch. By the time he got to the Tomb Scene in Aida, his flat notes were crossing the pain threshold. Full-voiced Russian mezzo-soprano Tatyana Kamninskaya stole the show as a passionate, vindictive Amneris, Aida's royal rival. Krassimir Topolov remains too tame a conductor for these impassioned scores, but there's always good playing. TLE will be back March 6-8 for the classic Cavalleria rusticana/Pagliacci double bill.
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Perched on the lid of a lace-draped baby grand, a bobblehead quivers along with Christine Teeters's vibrato as she powers through a Tuesday-night voice lesson in the Steinway Piano Building on Boylston Street.
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Charles Ives's Fourth Symphony is a stunner. And Boston Symphony Orchestra guest conductor Alan Gilbert, the New York Philharmonic's music director designate led a stunning performance.
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Back in pre-history (1964), a brilliant young Brit, a cellist (student of Benjamin Britten) and conductor, came to town and shook up the local classical-music scene.
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Last week's Boston Symphony concert was a snaggle of contradictions. British guest conductor Mark Wigglesworth was substituting for the exciting but erratic Russian maestro Yuri Termirkanov, who'd cancelled all his American appearances.
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At least one of the reasons many of us contemporary-music fans don't get into classical music is because it seems like no one wants us to listen to it.
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Two opera productions overlapping at the Calderwood Pavilion exploit exploitation.
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In the best performances, Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, sometimes called his Tragic , can sound like his greatest.
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Probably most music lovers wouldn’t head their greatest-composer list with Carl Orff, despite the popularity of his violent, garish, sumptuously tuneful Carmina burana .
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Classical
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