News Feeds for ANGEL RECORDS ARTIST

Sarah Chang Lights Up the Hollywood Bowl

ANGEL RECORDS ARTIST — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 04:00:00 GMT

Music review: Leonard Slatkin and Sarah Chang return to the Hollywood Bowl for Shostakovich

August 25, 2010

by Mark Swed

After having spent a weekend devoted to Tchaikovsky with its current principal guest conductor for the Hollywood Bowl, Bramwell Tovey, the Los Angeles Philharmonic went from an eagerly cheerless and iconic 19th century Russian composer to a 20th century one on Tuesday. This time the conductor was Leonard Slatkin, the orchestra's first and previous principal guest at the Bowl, and the program was all Shostakovich.

The Tchaikovsky Spectacular, which began with a festive coronation march for Czar Alexander III, was designed for fun and fireworks. Slatkin's Shostakovich was serious -- a violin concerto and symphony by a composer squirming under Stalin's thumb. Yet Tuesday's crowd was a gratifyingly sizable 8,797, only 20% fewer than TGIF pleasure-seekers a few days earlier.

Slatkin has, himself, had a tumultuous year. He suffered, in Holland, a heart attack and, in New York, a Met attack. He recovered from both, although his unhappy Metropolitan Opera engagement, where he was accused of being unprepared to conduct Verdi's "La Traviata," still seems to follow him.

Things clearly went wrong at the Met. But anyone who could offer as compellingly strong a performance of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony and gracefully support as compellingly strong a soloist as Sarah Chang in Shostakovich's Violin Concerto No. 1 -- all with minimal rehearsal time Tuesday -- knows what he is doing.

Click here to read more

Gabriela Montero rules SummerFest

ANGEL RECORDS ARTIST — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 04:00:00 GMT

Montero turns SummerFest into Gabriela's place

By James Chute , UNION-TRIBUNE

Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 9:25 a.m.

K.C. Alfred / Photo by K.C. Alfred/The San Diego Union-Tribune

Pianist Gabriela Montero with violinists Margaret Batjer and Cho-Liang Lin and cellist Desmond Hoebig at SummerFest

There aren’t many classical pianists who could get an audience to sing “Love is a Many-Splendored Thing,” and then improvise a set of variations on the theme by Sammy Fain made famous in the 1955 film. But Gabriela Montero turned Sherwood Auditorium into her own high-class piano bar Wednesday in a stimulating SummerFest program of works by Granados, Grainger and Ginastera in addition to Montero’s improvisations on themes submitted by members of the audience.

Montero has an easy, effortless way of playing the piano, no matter how demanding the music. And this program had an extremely high level of technical and musical difficulty, from the thorny, complex Ginastera Sonata No. 1 to Grainger’s four-handed tour-de-force, the Fantasy on Geroge Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” for two pianos.

Click here to read more

Quatuor Ebène receives a terrific review of their Mostly Mozart performance

ANGEL RECORDS ARTIST — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 04:00:00 GMT

August 19, 2010

Ludwig and Amadeus, Meeting for a Nightcap

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

The members of any string quartet will tell you that it takes a great deal of disciplined work to achieve technical finesse and control. The four young Parisian men who form the Ebène Quartet have certainly worked hard, which partly explains why they are increasingly viewed as one of the standout quartets of the new generation.

The discipline of their music making came through on Wednesday at the Kaplan Penthouse, part of the Mostly Mozart Festival’s Little Night Music series of 60-minute programs starting at 10:30. Yet even more impressive was the spontaneity, the almost freewheeling vitality, in their performances of Mozart’s early Divertimento in D (K. 136) and Beethoven’s late String Quartet in C sharp minor (Op. 131).

The 10-minute divertimento, written when Mozart was 16, was wonderfully lithe and loose. The buoyant, animated first movement had all the precision and articulate clarity that you could ask for. Yet there was something improvisatory about the playing. During one episode a violin riff of fleet descending scales recurs, and each time it returned, the first violinist, Pierre Colombet, played it a little differently, sometimes teasing his colleagues by holding back at the start, sometimes zipping by in a flash.

The theme of the slow movement, first heard as a duo for violins, was elegantly shaped by Mr. Colombet and the second violinist, Gabriel Le Magadure. During fleeting melodic turns the violist, Mathieu Herzog, played with a dusky tone and piercing clarity. And in the Presto finale the two violinists traded lickety-split runs with a coy blend of breeziness and intensity.

At the start of the program the quartet’s cellist, Raphaël Merlin gave a charming talk to explain that, other than having been written in Austria, the Mozart divertimento and the Beethoven quartet are “absolutely opposite.”

It did take a leap for the musicians, and the audience, to shift mind-sets for the astonishingly late Beethoven work: a 40-minute mystical, moody quartet structured in seven essentially continuous movements.

They began the opening Adagio at a restrained tempo, letting the somber theme build inexorably into a web of ethereal counterpoint. At times they took advantage of the intimate penthouse setting by playing with uncommon softness and subtlety. During the elaborate Andante, as a beguiling cantabile melody wound its way, Mr. Merlin brought a touch of jazzy verve to a long pizzicato cello line, which reminded me that the Ebène sometimes plays jazz and pop pieces, as it did last year at Le Poisson Rouge in Greenwich Village.

During the frenetic, wild-eyed Presto movement, the Ebène brought earthy power and raw tone to its playing. If there were rough spots, it did not matter for all the rhapsodic daring of this performance.

The audience seemed riveted. There was not one cough, not one fidgety distraction. This is a credit to the Ebène Quartet, but also to the setting. Hearing a short program of great pieces at a late hour in the classical music scene’s equivalent of a sleek nightclub, with complimentary wine, really focuses the attention of concertgoers.

The Mostly Mozart Festival runs through Saturday at Lincoln Center; (212) 721-6500, MostlyMozart.org.

The New York Times gave David Fray a wonderful review for his performance at Lincoln Center's Mostly

ANGEL RECORDS ARTIST — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 04:00:00 GMT

Youth will be served in the classical music world these days, and the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center has become an important gateway. The weekend concerts of the festival orchestra featured two Frenchmen, one young, the other startlingly young.

David Fray, a 29-year-old pianist who has been garnering acclaim both on record and in performance, was making his festival debut in Mozart’s Concerto No. 22 in E flat. He is a brilliant pianist, though incongruously, from certain angles his lanky physique and flowing shoulder-length hair bring to mind the rustic character Ed Chigliak from “Northern Exposure.”

This work has more and deeper moods than some Mozart concertos, and Mr. Fray traced them knowingly at the second performance, on Saturday, ultimately emerging into pure Mozartean joy by way of a witty exit from the cadenza of the finale and a few late flourishes. (Mr. Fray, clearly a thoughtful pianist, played the pianist Edwin Fischer’s cadenzas, the one in the first movement being especially striking, but he might do well to work out some of his own.)

Lionel Bringuier, who conducted, is 23, and this was not even his festival debut, which came two years ago. He seemed at one with Mr. Fray’s probing and sometimes understated conception, reining in the orchestra as necessary.

The program opened with Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” Overture. Though a pleasant scene setter for the opera, this overture, unlike others by Mozart, does not carry much drama of its own and is thus not the most effective concert piece. The real theatrical overtones came at the end, with Mozart’s “Prague” Symphony, which breathes the same air as “Don Giovanni” and sometimes verges on the same musical gestures. (The symphony and the opera were both performed in Prague in 1787.)

Again Mr. Bringuier drew fine, committed playing from the orchestra, though the entry of the first movement’s main theme, after the mysterious introduction, was so restrained that the syncopated underlay, a distinctive dramatic touch all its own, barely registered.

After all that Mozart, the Little Night Music recital that followed in the Kaplan Penthouse took a post-Mozartean tack, as the violinist Isabelle Faust and the pianist Alexander Melnikov played three Beethoven sonatas. (They have recorded all 10 works for Harmonia Mundi.)

It is a rare program of Beethoven violin sonatas that avoids the ones made famous by their nicknames, but Ms. Faust and Mr. Melnikov chose a swath between the “Spring” and the “Kreutzer”: Nos. 6, 7 and 8. As it is, the Seventh has gained recognition as one of Beethoven’s great and weighty works in C minor, and the Eighth, in G, is treasurable as a repository of sparkling Beethovenian wit. Ms. Faust and Mr. Melnikov gave each of these disparate works its due without managing to lift the Sixth to the same level. (No surprise there.)

Ms. Faust played compellingly, with judicious application of vibrato, not striving for a particularly big tone. Perhaps taking his cue from her, Mr. Melnikov was almost too deferential.

To judge from reports on his recent recording of Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues (Op. 87) for Harmonia Mundi, Mr. Melnikov does not lack temperament, but he did not show enough of it here. He skated over the keyboard at times, using a sort of half-touch (with the piano lid fully open) that eventually grew frustrating. You began to long for some crunching chords or a really emphatic melody. This was Beethoven, after all.

Yet another pianist, Jenny Lin, gave preconcert recitals in Avery Fisher Hall on Friday and Saturday that — more than setting the stage for the concerts — set the agenda for the festival’s next weekend: a four-day minifestival, Bach and Polyphonies, conceived by the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Ms. Lin played excerpts from the first book of Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” and from that Opus 87 of Shostakovich, which was modeled after “The Well-Tempered Clavier.” Ms. Lin too has recorded the Shostakovich works, for Hänssler Classic.

Her presentations were exemplary. Though she covered only four prelude-and-fugue pairings by Bach and four by Shostakovich in total, she opened on Friday with Shostakovich’s Prelude and Fugue No. 1, in C, and ended on Saturday with his Prelude and Fugue No. 24, in D minor, giving a limited but vivid sense of the vastness of the canvas and the richness and variety of expression in these great works.

And she followed that C major Prelude of Shostakovich’s, whose songlike simplicity proves deceptive, with Bach’s C major Prelude, which remains simplicity itself. She wove back and forth between composers with little pause and with a more or less one-fits-all pianistic style that did indeed fit most."

Article by JAMES R. OESTREICH

read more here!

Quatuor Ebène will be performing on WNYC "Soundcheck" today

ANGEL RECORDS ARTIST — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 04:00:00 GMT

The Paris-based Ebène Quartet is quickly becoming one of the most sought-after young string quartets. The group plays standards by Mozart and Debussy just as eagerly as they do songs by The Beatles, Wayne Shorter and Jobim.

They join us to perform live selections from their forthcoming CD, including “Misirlou,” the surf-rock number featured in "Pulp Fiction."

CLICK for more info.

EMI/Virgin artists Joyce DiDonato, Yannick Nézet-Séguin & Antonio Pappano have been nominated for Gr

ANGEL RECORDS ARTIST — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 04:00:00 GMT

VOTE!

David Fray and Pablo Heras-Casado make 'heroic' Hollywood Bowl debuts

ANGEL RECORDS ARTIST — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 04:00:00 GMT

David Fray and Pablo Heras-Casado make 'heroic' Hollywood Bowl debuts

Mark Swed

The crowd at the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s “Heroic Beethoven” program Tuesday night at the Hollywood Bowl can be forgiven for thinking the heroic meant them, enduring an arctic chill to hear the Third Piano Concerto and Third Symphony. Crazy as this must seem to New Yorkers who, this month, are fanning themselves silly at sweltering outdoor concerts held in record heat, our orchestra has been praying for a heat wave. Beethoven usually draws more than Tuesday’s 6,236.

I’m willing to do my part, lighting incense for Ra, Surya, Shamash, Sol Invictus or any other solar deity on duty this week if that will help encourage audiences come Thursday, when the program repeats. Be there to hear Spanish conductor Pablo Heras-Casado lead a startlingly percussive account of the “Eroica” Symphony or check out Paris’ hottest young pianist, David Fray -- both making their Hollywood Bowl debuts.

Although this was their first time performing together, the 29-year-old pianist and 32-year-old conductor have much in common. Fray comes from the South of France, just across the Pyrenees from the Spanish border; Heras-Casado is a Grenadian, from Southern Spain. Fray has been closely associated with Bach and some have begun comparing him to Glenn Gould for his highly involved style of playing. Heras-Casado has worked in the early music movement.

Read the full article!

MercuryNews.com recommends John Adams: "American Counterpoint" in celebration of the Music@Menlo cha

ANGEL RECORDS ARTIST — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 04:00:00 GMT

Recommended classical CDs to celebrate opening of Music@Menlo festival

By Richard Scheinin

John Adams: "American Counterpoint" (EMI). Adams' symphony-length work "Harmonielehre," from the mid-'80s, married minimalism to Mahler and Sibelius. It's gorgeous, and it's given a definitive performance on this reissue by Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. The disc, part of EMI's "American Classics" series, also includes intriguing little masterworks by John Cage and Conlon Nancarrow. (P.S. You might also try out Adams' more recent "City Noir," shadowy and jazz-infused, and performed by Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It's available by download from DG Concerts at iTunes.)

Read the full article here.

Libera Announces US Summer Tour Dates

ANGEL RECORDS ARTIST — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 04:00:00 GMT

Libera is delighted to announce details about for Summer USA Tour:

Sunday 1st August 7.30pm

Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church, Dallas

Admission Free – a goodwill offering will be taken

Visit Website

Monday 2nd August 7.30pm

Arborlawn Methodist Church, Fort Worth

Admission Free – a goodwill offering will be taken

Visit Website

Thursday 5th August 7.30pm

Cathedral Basilica, St Louis

Tickets $37/$27/$17 - buy tickets here

Sunday 8th August 7.00pm

Brentwood Methodist Church, Nashville

Admission Free – a goodwill offering will be taken

Visit Website

Tuesday 10th August 7.00pm

Peachtree Presbyterian Church, Atlanta

Tickets $10/$20

Visit Website

Boston Globe Reviews Artemis Quartet New Release

ANGEL RECORDS ARTIST — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 04:00:00 GMT

"Here are two recent entries in what is shaping up to be the most engaging Beethoven quartet cycle in recent memory. Each ensemble that comes to this music does so with its own interpretive mien, and the Artemis’s can be described as a fusion of two different quartet traditions: one that emphasizes sonic beauty (like the Alban Berg Quartet) and one that sees drive and intensity as paramount (such as the Juilliard or Emerson). In finding a meeting point between the two extremes, the Artemis has managed the difficult task of finding something new and vital to say about these well-examined works.

You can hear it in the weight and seriousness they impart to the two early quartets from Op. 18, and it’s also present in the slow movements of the late quartets, especially the Cavatina of Op. 130 and the “Heiliger Dankgesang’’ of Op. 132: Both sound plush and gorgeous, yet the quartet resists the temptation to play them too slowly and lose the underlying momentum. But their approach pays its largest dividends in the “Grosse Fuge,’’ which often sounds like an unruly sample of early Expressionism. The Artemis, though, makes it amazingly transparent and logical, like the contrapuntal conversation it actually is." - David Weininger

To read more, click here!