Word: schumann
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Upshaw returned for slightly more modern music: Berg's Seven Early Songs, begun in the composer's twenty-first year. The music is motley, elusive stuff that manages to sound at times like Schumann and at others like Schoenberg. The poetry of the seven different poets is altogether better and fresher than the Schubert texts. Of special literary value is Rilke's text for the fourth song, "The Crown of Dreams," but the musical hair-raisers were the first ("Night") and seventh ("Summer Days"). In each, Upshaw's intonation and delivery etched certain phrases in the mind: "Gib acht" ("give...
...second half of the concert opened with the only overtly familiar piece of the evening, Schumann's Arabeske, Op. 18. Goode, who has such a feel for all things grand and Beethovenian, seemed an unlikely choice to perform a piece written for young, dainty pianists, but the delicacy of his touch here surpassed even his sensitivity in the Brahms...
...regular program concluded with a gorgeous performance of Schumann's Op. 39 Liederkreis, a cycle from 1840, the legendary "year of song." Working with texts by the poet and novelist Joseph Eichendorff, Schumann dashed off these twelve songs in a few weeks in May--have you finished your term papers? The duo's singing and playing shared a similar exuberance. Upshaw's fierce glares and terror-filled voice in "Waldgespruch" (Wood Dialogue) were playfully evocative of the Schubert Erlkoening, while Goode evoked the Liszt "Wild Jagd" transcendental etude when a line of Eichendorff's mentioned "ein lustiges Jagd," a merry...
...number of strings on his piano had suddenly tripled. The last verse, which tells of a natural world sympathetic to the joys of a young lover, kindled real romance. It also revealed a hidden order in the evening's songs: in each set, Schubert, Berg, and Schumann, the nightingale made at least one appearance...
Emmanuel holds other concert series in addition to the cantatas: in recent years, these have explored the likes of Mozart, Debussy and Schumann. This year marks the beginning of a 7-year cycle devoted to Schubert. Many of Boston's most revered classical music figures have been anxious to become involved with Emmanuel: composer John Harbison, Seiji Ozawa, the director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and Christopher Hog-wood, the director of the Handel & Haydn Society, regularly serve as guest conductors...