"Last night I saw Rossini's Barber for the third time in as many weeks. My taste must be totally depraved because I find this Figaro of Rossini a hundred times more preferable to Mozart's."

- G.W. Friedrich Hegel

Boston Lyric Opera

To hear a performance of Lincoln Portrait with the United States Marine Band, conductor Col. Michael J. Colburn, and narrator Brian Stokes Mitchell, click on "Listen" above.

Written in 1942, Lincoln Portrait, by Aaron Copland, is a rare musical tribute to an American President. It played an inspirational role when it was written, during the dark, early days of World War II.

But it continued to inspire over the decades, with countless notable narrators giving voice to the words by Abraham Lincoln that Copland chose for his tribute.

Those words, though, were chosen from within a surprising cultural context, as Bob Seay explains:

If Lincoln's words express the highest ideals of American democracy, Copland's music expresses the diversity of sources that have combined to create an American music and culture, as James David Jacobs writes:

It’s hard in 2012 to appreciate just how original Copland’s Lincoln Portrait was in 1942. There had been other works that combined spoken text with orchestra, but the combination of serious public statement and serious artistic statement, with ceremony, history, and politics coexisting with music, was, and remains, rare.

The music Copland wrote isn’t mere backdrop for the words, the narrator not even speaking until the piece is about half over. That music tells a story, a story of both an individual life and of a nation. It’s also a story of diverse musical influences, reflecting the diverse musical strands that have come together to create an American music.

The beginning of the work is typical Copland, with woodwinds uttering soft three-note mottoes in intervals of fourths and fifths. That serenity, however, is answered by unsettling chords. It’s not unlike Ives’s The Unanswered Question and its dialogue between a stark, angular statement and its muddled response.

The classical music season has seen some dynamic performances over the last few months, but they took place alongside some unexpected developments.

Jeremy Eichler and Brian McCreath talk about a few of the low and high points.

Part 1: Opera Boston, Bemjamin Zander and the New England Conservatory, and Calderwood Hall at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

For more about Opera Boston, visit the Boston Globe, with reporting and analysis by Geoff Edgers and history by Matthew Guerrieri (registration required).

Classical New England has video from Calderwood Hall, and for more about concerts scheduled there, visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner Musuem.

Part 2: Continued cancellations at the BSO, and looking forward to a few events coming up

For Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts on-demand, visit BSO Radio, and for tickets to upcoming concerts, including the week wtih guest conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, visit the BSO.

For information about performances of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, visit the Handel and Haydn Society. For more about Tan Dun's Water Passion After St. Matthew, visit the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.

Full conversation, with additional commentary on the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Opera Boston, Calderwood Hall, and more

(image of Boston skyline:  Boston Skyline At Night By Archon Fung (Arfung at en.wikipedia) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

 

Messiah, originally written to benefit the Foundling Hospital in Dublin, was premiered in 1742 during the season of Lent, the penitential time of year preceding Easter. 

Handel had more or less invented the oratorio as a way of staging performances at that time of year.  Opera houses were dark for the season, so the oratorio, with the recitatives, arias, and choruses of opera but none of the staging, was a pathway to entertaining, dramatic music and performances ... and the resulting box office receipts.

But not long after that first performance, Messiah found a home during the Christmas season, and it's stayed there almost exclusively ever since.  The Handel and Haydn Society gave the U.S. premiere in 1818, and now Messiah can be found every year in countless performances around the country.

I looked into the Messiah phenomenon with Thomas Forrest Kelly of Harvard University, Handel and Haydn Society Artistic Director Harry Christophers, and Masterworks Chorale Music Director Steven Karidoyanes. To hear the feature, click on "Listen" above.
 

Boston Baroque, Dec. 7 & 8

Providence Singers, Dec. 8

Trinity Church, Dec. 9

Masterworks Chorale Sing, Dec. 14 & 15

And here is video from a previous Masterworks Chorale Sing:

Hear the 2012 Monadnock Music Festival episode of New England Summer Festivals

Hear the 2011 Monadnock Music Festival episode of New England Summer Festivals

The 2012 Monadnock Music Festival begins on July 6 and runs through August 11, with new Artistic Director Gil Rose.

Concerts are held in several locations throughout the Monadnock region of New Hampshire.  Our map shows the location of Peterborough, where the festival is based, and where concerts take place in the historic Peterborough Town House.

Other concert venues include the Jaffrey Center Meeting House, the Harrisville Community Church, and Francestown's Old Meeting House.

The Monadnock region is approximately two hours from Boston and offers a wealth of dining and lodging options.

Music lovers travelling through the Monadnock region may also want to visit the famous MacDowell Artist Colony, where countless masterpieces of music, literature, drama, and visual art have been created.  Monadnock State Park offers excellent hiking and other outdoor experiences, and Toadbooks will keep book lovers occupied for hours.

James Bolle founded Monadnock Music in 1966 with a few concerts at the Nelson Meeting House.  Bolle was committed to programming music by American composers, resulting in visits, coachings, and performances with composers such as Aaron Copland, Roger Sessions, John Adams, and many others.


 

Hear James Levine's conversation with Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air:

May 4, 2011

On June 5, 1971, James Levine lifted his baton and stepped up on the stage at The Metropolitan Opera. The occasion was a festival performance of Tosca. It was also the 27-year-old Levine's debut performance at the Met.

Since then, Levine has conducted works by Verdi, Mozart, Wagner, Rossini, Stravinsky, Debussy and countless others during his 40-year career with the Met. But, he says, he still remembers that first night on the stage.

"I was very excited, but I wasn't nervous," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "I kept thinking I should be nervous, but I wasn't. And I think the reason was I had really grown up concentrating on music and on opera, and particularly on the Met. ... So when the time came that I was actually standing there conducting, I remember feeling amazingly at home."

Levine is the subject of a new PBS documentary, James Levine: America's Maestro, as well as James Levine: 40 Years at the Metropolitan Opera, a coffeetable book documenting some of the 2,500 performances he has conducted at the Met. The Met has also released James Levine: Celebrating 40 Years at the Met, two box sets of DVDs and CDs capturing 22 of his nearly 2,500 live opera performances.

Levine recently announced that he would be stepping down as the musical director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which he first conducted in 1972. But he'll continue his tenure at the Met, where he's known for bringing out the best in his musicians and in the company orchestra. In 1994, The New Yorker's Frederic Dannen credited Levine with "developing the orchestra from a mediocre pit band into a world-class ensemble." Levine says that any changes he made were slow and methodical, and always with his musicians in mind.

"Year after year, as we played a more and more diverse repertoire, as we learned a lot of new things [and] as we repeated the difficult and special works more frequently, all these bits and pieces added up to what we needed to make improvements," he says. "We began to play symphonic repertoire and chamber repertoire, which is absolutely essential for orchestra members to improve, and I think ... essentially [we tried to] find every possible constructive solution to the problems that we had. And I think, for the most part, that's the way it's played out for the past 40 years."

Conducting Style

Levine tells Terry Gross that one of the most important things he does as a conductor is something he actively tries not to do — get in the way of the artistry of the musicians who are playing.

"I want to be always there for the players, so when they check for something they want to remember — or for something that they need, or for something that is a technical help in the concert — they can see it," he says. "But I want to do that in a way in which the audience is not getting a visual show instead of an aural one."

Levine's style at the podium has always been more muted than that of some of his colleagues. He does not gesticulate wildly or move his arms rapidly because, he says, he does not want to interfere with his audience's perception of the music.

"If your orientation is to watch the conductor, you get your aural sense interfered with in a way that is not completely controllable and conscious — because you see the conductor gesturing in a way that shows something about his feeling about the passage. And this, unconsciously, you measure against what you hear," he says. "And I think the most satisfying pieces that I hear live are usually conducted by conductors who have a very clear-cut idea of what their function is at a rehearsal and what their function is at a concert."

Metropolitan Opera

In rehearsals, Levine says he uses everything in his power to make the orchestra conscious of every single detail in the music. He'll gesticulate and stop the rehearsal, sometimes repeatedly, to illustrate sudden tempo or chord changes within a piece.

"But when the performance comes, the orchestra has to be empowered to function within this conception without having to check with the middle man," he says. "It's not possible to feel and play and respond to what you feel inside and keep looking to have a constant alignment with the gesture of the conductor."

James Levine was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1997. He conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for the soundtrack of Fantasia 2000, and he has also conducted the Vienna Philharmonic, the Berlin Philharmonic and the Munich Philharmonic orchestra.
 

.
On Working With Singers


"Some of the things that you work on, when you're working on interpretation and communication, they have technical aspects. And you have to include those technical aspects, or you can't get at the diagnosis of the problem or the solution. But I don't spend sessions giving people voice lessons, per se. I'm not a voice teacher. But I'm a conductor and a coach, and a lot of technical observation goes into that."

On Stuttering As A Child

"When I was a little kid, I used to reach up high and try to play the piano when I passed by. And I also, at that time, could sing a tune coherently, but I had a very strong speech impediment. And when my parents said to the doctor, 'Well, what do you think?' — when they told him about my banging on the piano, he suggested piano lessons. And I started piano lessons when I was not quite 4 years old. And the speech impediment promptly disappeared, and I got very interested in the piano."

On His Debut At Age 10 With The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra

"I hear a great deal of music differently now, because the more music you know and the longer you live, the more insight you have to the complicated music. But fortunately, there are some pieces, and Mendelssohn's Piano Concerto No. 2 is one of them, that have a fairly exuberant and adolescent conception, and it was a very appropriate piece for me to play at that age. And my feeling for it was strong then and has never abated. I still think it's a marvelous piece."

On His Back Pain

"My general health has always been so good, and my life has always been so fortunate, so even when this has really made my life miserable for periods of time, I still feel like a very, very lucky guy. I look around me, and I don't see anybody who doesn't have to solve some kinds of problems; everything can't be perfect. Human beings go through things. And my doctors all think that, in the course of the next year or two, I still have one area giving me pain. And if we do, in fact, solve that — we still have some things we can do to solve it — I may wake up one day and be free of back pain again."

In 2005, Mr. Laplante was honored to be named an Officer of the Order of Canada. In that same year, he was awarded the Prix Opus for Best Performer of the Year.  In 1999, he received two Opus Awards for live performances: "Best Concert in Montréal" and "Best Concert in Québec Province." Most recently, in 2010, he received another Prix Opus, this time for Best Concert of the Year.

He joins host Cathy Fuller in the Fraser Performance Studio for a program that includes

J.S. Bach/Ferruccio Busoni - Adagio in A minor

Haydn - Sonata in E-flat, Hob. XVI: 52

Franz Liszt - Sonetto 104 del Petrarca and Après une lecture du Dante, from Years of Pilgrimage, Book II (Italy)



(photo:  Peter Schaaf)

BOSTON — The Boston Symphony Orchestra is facing a season of change. The departure of its world-renowned music director James Levine has left a formidable institution without a permanent music director. As it considers its next act, the orchestra finds itself considering both Levine’s legacy and its own goals for the future.
 
Levine announced last week that he’ll resign his post, effective in September. Hailed as the best conductor since Leonard Bernstein, Levine brought critical success and a reinvigorated reputation to the BSO. But the latter years of his tenure were dogged by back problems and related health complications.
   
Some observers sense an oncoming crisis for the institution, as it tries to stabilize after Levine’s chronic health issues resulted in only inconsistent appearances by the conductor – and falling ticket sales that some think were related to Levine’s absence.
 
Other critics view now as an exciting time for the BSO, an opportunity build on Levine’s success with the BSO while adjusting old paradigms and reach new audiences.
 
WGBH’s Callie Crossley sat down with Lloyd Schwartz, Pulitzer Prize winning writer and classical music editor of The Boston Phoenix; Yehudi Wyner, a composer and pianist who won a Pulitzer Prize for composition in 2006; and our arts and culture contributor Alicia Anstead, to discuss Levine, the state of the BSO and what might come next. Here are some highlights of their discussion.
 

 
On Levine’s Musical Gifts
 
Wyner: Levine came from the deepest sources of classical music. He’s a marvelous pianist, and an overall musician of extraordinary gifts. Certainly not second to Leonard Bernstein in terms of his ability to interpret music, and to absorb it. The amount of absorption, the amount that a man like this has really digested, and retains, is universal. It’s like a compendium of classical music canon.
 
On Levine’s Program
 
Wyner: Almost all the great music directors have sooner or later come to a commissioning program of adventurous new pieces… the problem that came up with Jimmy, as far as audience was concerned, (was) that he immediately jumped to something that had not easily prepared and organically prepared by the Boston Symphony in the previous years. That is, a certain kind of very radical, sometimes theoretical music that Jimmy is very partial to. And sometimes that may be very great.
 
Moreover, he balanced programs. There was lots of music that was not new.
 
Schwartz: For me, the absolute high point of Levine’s tenure here was the year he did joining Beethoven and Schoenberg on the same programs. So that on one hand, you knew that some of the music was going to appeal to a larger audience and some people were going to resent having to sit through something they thought they didn’t want to hear. And yet, those concerts were so illuminating, because you could hear Schoenberg taking off from where Beethoven left off.
 
That was a brilliant idea, and maybe some of the BSO regulars resented that, but on the other hand, there was a whole new audience of both younger people who were really curious about this juxatopistion, and there were also people from the university music departments who had stopped going to the BSO because they were so bored with the program, and suddenly, filling the seats because there was an actual programming idea that they were interested in.
 
The State of the Orchestra
 
Anstead: With all respect to the difficulties that the BSO administration is in right now, in filling in these gaps, and that the orchestra members themselves are facing in morale, and also what Levine himself is experiencing medically – that’s all very difficult. What’s exciting, is that the BSO is actually in such a great position, to embrace a whole new world.
 
They have a robust online presence, with music that’s recorded there… The BSO is well-positioned, it’s one of the strongest orchestras in the country, if not one with the biggest budget. 
 
Schwartz:Crisis is not quite the right word because partly – or maybe even mostly – Levine, when he came here, really transformed the orchestra. I’ve lived in Boston since 1962. I’ve been going to the BSO since 1962, I don’t think it has ever been in this good shape since I’ve been there.
 
Wyner: (The BSO management) are first class in their field, and they haven’t been sitting on – well, whatever you sit on – not thinking about the future.
 
What’s Required of His Replacement
 
Wyner: We tend to think of a conductor from the outside-in, but how do the members of the orchestra – or even someone like the BSO’s librarian – think of the conductor? Also, how does a conductor relate to the press? How does his image project in raising funds? How does he look on the cover of a brochure? The factors are innumerable. It’s not just how they wave their arm and the knowledge of the music.
 
Anstead: Artistic excellence is the most fundamental quality a new conductor will have to have.  The face of music in Boston could of course be a woman. What would happen if someone like an Alondra De La Perra or a Dudamel took root and made cultural connections with younger people?

Schwartz:I believe that the future of classical music lies with women. It used to be thought that young women didn’t have the right kind of DNA to play Beethoven or Bach. But women are the largest constituencies in our music schools and they are becoming the majority of players. How long are they going to stand for the hegemony of the male leader?
 
We hope that whoever becomes the music director has broad taste, and that includes centempory music, 20^th century music, and even early 21^st century music
 
Anstead: They’re also going to have to understand that the audience is no longer a sit-still audience – that they are digitally driven, that they are immigrants, and that the digital world is her to stay
 
Role of BSO in the City and Going Forward
 
Wyner: A symphony orchestra in a city, a major symphony orchestra, stands as a kind of icon and a beacon of civilization. It is a measure by which the quality of intellectual and emotional life is regarded and judged…For that reason, even though it’s attractive to only a fairly small minority of people…nevertheless, it’s that kind of a moniker, that kind of an identification, ‘Yeah, Boston really is a classy city.
 
Anstead: It’s not quite like the Red Sox and it’s not quite like the Celtics, and yet, in terms of our global pride out in the world, not just locally but out in the world, the BSO has just as much reach. This is a world-class orchestra. It’s in the top 20 orchestras of the world. And that gives it a unique place, not just in local pride but national pride. And that makes it an organization that exchanges cultural information, cultural knowledge, reaches across all sorts of borders, which music does, of course. And I would put it on a par not only with the Boston Museum of Fine Arts but with the Boston Public Library System, in creating an important place for our city. Not only here, but beyond our town lines.
 
Schwartz: BSO performances are not only live performances at Symphony Hall. There are recordings, including some recent Grammy-winning recordings, that certainly are accessible and available to people who certainly aren’t anywhere near Boston and probably never will be…The outreach is huge. And in fact one of the triggers for this recent crisis is that the Boston Symphony Orchestra does go on tour outside of Boston, and there were scheduled performances, which are taking place but without the maestro, at Carnegie Hall, at the Kennedy Center, and at several other places in the northeast corridor. And the orchestra has certainly been to Europe.

Feb 24, 2011

BOSTON – Based on the original P.L. Travers children’s stories and the 1964 Walt Disney film, the stage version of Mary Poppins is now playing at the Boston Opera House through March 20. The current stage version takes inspiration primarily from the film, whose music was written by brothers Richard and Robert Sherman.
 
At age 83, Richard Sherman still has the ability to recount with sharpness and insight the creation of the music and his relationship with Walt Disney.
 
“[Walt] would never say ‘wonderful, great,’ but he would say ‘hmmm… yeah’” remembers Sherman. “Behind your back he would say ‘they wrote the perfect song for this scene,' but never to your face.”
 
Mary Poppins tells the story of the enchanting but firm nanny who literally blows into an English town to care for two precocious children. Her philosophy is best summed up in one of her signature songs, “A Spoonful of Sugar.”
 
“It was in part meant to get at Mary's contrarian nature,” Sherman says. “Mary Poppins did things you didn't expect, so when she sings,”
 
Just a spoonful of sugar
Helps the medicine go down
 
“Anybody would go down with the melody when they sing ‘down,’ but that’s not Mary Poppins. So we wrote the melody, we had her go up. That’s how we wrote the song.”

Another of the Mary Poppins classic tunes was written for the chimney-sweeper Bert, who is elevated from a minor character in the books to one of the show’s central characters.
 
“We had to change the word ‘chimney’ to make it work,” explains Sherman. “It’s kind of a button-down word, and we wanted to give it a flow and have a nice feel to it. So it became ‘chim, chimaney, chim, chimaney, chim chim cher-ee.”
 
Speaking of words, the show is perhaps most famous for introducing the world to the word ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.’
 
Foster explains, “We thought, let’s give them a crazy word, an obnoxious, super colossal word. It started with atrocious, which makes you sound smart… and then that would make your precocious… and then why not docious. That’s the way it started.”

Of the more than 150 songs Richard and Robert Sherman wrote for Disney movies, TV shows, and theme park rides – including “It’s a Small World” – one became Walt Disney’s favorite. That one was Mary Poppins’ “Feed the Birds.”
 
“[Walt] wanted a symbolic song, so we found in the books a scene with an old lady selling bread crumbs on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. It says that it doesn't take very much to give kindness, to give love.”
 
Mary Poppins plays at the Boston Opera House through March 20. Showtimes and tickets can be found at broadwayacrossamerica.com.

The Grammy Awards are this Sunday and among the nominees is Bostonian and Berklee College of Music alumnus Danilo  Pérez, nominated for Best Jazz Instrumental Album for his latest release Providencia.
 
With a career that spans more than two decades, Pérez’s journey has taken him from his native Panama to stages all over the world. Perez’s latest release finds him crossing musical genres from around the globe, combining elements of jazz, classical, and Latin American folk music.
 
Pérez has played on several Grammy Award-winning albums before, as part of bands backing up Arturo Sandoval and Dizzy Gillespie. This is his first nomination under his own name and as his own producer.
 
“It's very exciting… this is very special for me…for many years, with my name, I'm supposed to be playing and producing only things that are related to Latin music. So in a sense, it’s new to have a Latin name in the jazz category,” says Pérez.
 
Providencia opens with a piece inspired by Pérez’s oldest daughter, which he plans to develop into a longer symphony.
 
“I started with the emotion I felt when she was born. My wife and I just looked at her and we started crying,” says Pérez.
 
“There are six years of her life in the music, and my youngest one is also a part of the piece. I'm committed to developing this piece. They have brought so much Inspiration to my life, and I feel so energized and so creative when I'm around them.”

Maria Hinojosa: One-On-One: Danilo Pérez
In this interview with María Hinojosa, Pérez talks about what he learned from Dizzy Gillespie, his creative process, and the future of jazz. The broadcast include a perform taped in our studios.
 

Greater Boston: Grammy-nominated musician Danilo Pérez
Jared Bowen sits down with Danilo  Pérez to talk about his latest release and his Grammy nomination.

Maria Hinojosa: One-On-One: Danilo Pérez in Concert
In 1993, a young Danilo Perez came to our WGBH studios, then located on 125 Western Avenue, to tape a music special for our series La Plaza. This wonderful special features Danilo performing some of his early compositions.
 

Jazz with Steve Schwartz: Only on 89.7
Host Steve Schwartz plays recordings made here at WGBH during live performances in our studios. This music can be heard no where else! Listen to Danilo  Pérez, Fred Hersch, Greg Abate, and George Garzone.