Word: orchestra
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Innovation often disappoints us. Whether an old or a new style is the best is irrelevant: the tension between the two still exists. Such tension filled last weekend's Boston Symphony Orchestra concert...
...three Indiana Jones films, E.T., Superman, the Star Wars trilogy and, most recently, Rosewood. For these and others, Williams has accrued five Oscars, one British Academy Award and 16 Grammys. He has also composed many concert pieces, including several concertos, most recently a trumpet concerto commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra. Boston audiences are most familiar with Williams as the conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra. Named the 19th conductor of the Pops in 1980, he retired in 1993. He remains the Conductor Laureate of the Orchestra and is Artist-in-Residence at Tanglewood...
...performance produced ample evidence of the artistry behind the fame and of their notoriety in classical music circles. The concert consisted of three wood-wind concertos, a Flute Concerto in G by Johann Joachim Quantz, a concerto for bassoon and orchestra called The Five Sacred Trees by Williams and the Pied Piper Fantasy by John Corigliano. A small highlighted paragraph in the program booklet introduced this program as an experiment in concerto styles, setting forth the traditional three-movement Quantz concerto as a "control" for the more contemporary programmatic styles of the last two concertos. Even in this small paragraph...
Despite the tension surrounding the program, the performances were superb. Galway performed the Quantz concerto with a reduced orchestra. He directed the first few bars of the piece, then took up the solo theme. His was a crystalline sound, rich in the lower registers and piercing in the higher range. He attacked the beginning of each phrase and sustained his brilliant sound through each seemingly impossible passage. His playing seemed to be in a different realm from the other musicians. It was difficult to associate the beautiful bubbling sound the produced with notes on a page. The orchestra...
...problems were mirrored in the male chorus, who had no better luck overcoming the blast of the orchestra and always looked somewhat out of order when coming onstage. There's a heartrending scene in Act Three, for example, in which the duke's toadies block Rigoletto's entrance to their lord's chambers, kicking the poor hunchback until his angry recriminations collapse into a pitiful plea for the return of his daughter. It's a moment that can move one to tears; yet here it looked so stagey that it failed to resonate...