Category: Uncategorized
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SUMMERMUSIK
The Cincinnati Chamber Music Orchestra’s SUMMERMUSIK returns this year with a lineup of twelve events throughout the month of August. August 5 at 7:30pm at the School for Creative & Performing Arts Beethoven Reconstructed explores a couple of compositions that the Master never wrote: the Symphony No. 10 E-flat Major, written in the style of…
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TENOR OF GRACE
BACKGROUND So Romantique! is the tongue-in-cheek title of a newly released album co-produced by Palazzetto Bru Zane and Alpha Classical Recordings, featuring the French tenor Cyrille Dubois in a collection of opera and operetta airs from the heyday of the French Romantic Lyric Theatre. The French vocal tradition from the haute-contre tenors of Lully and…
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Ascent International Chamber Music Festival
The seasons’ end is near for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the College Conservatory of Music, Matinee Musicale, Chamber Music Cincinnati, and Linton Music, to name just a few of the many large and small musical organizations in our city. The May Festival brings things to a close with Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand, the Cincinnati…
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A FEW THOUGHTS ABOUT CHAMPION
A few hours ago, I came back from watching the Metropolitan Opera HD presentation of Champion, the Terence Blanchard opera about the welterweight boxing champion Emile Griffith, who in a 1962 match-turned-assault pummeled into a pulp opponent Benny Paret, a hyper-macho boxer who had mocked Griffith for being a closeted homosexual, sending Paret into a…
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BOULDER BACH FESTIVAL
BACKGROUND Sono Luminus is releasing Boulder Bach Festival a recording that features works by J.S. Bach and Johann Christoph Bach made at the conclusion of the Boulder Bach Festival in 2022, marking the first commercial release from the festival, and including J.S. Bach’s Concerto in D minor for two violins, strings and basso continuo, the…
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SIX STRING QUARTETS
BACKGROUND Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745-1799), was born on the French-Caribbean Island of Guadeloupe as the son of an enslaved black woman and a white plantation owner. At the age eight he was sent to be educated in France, and by the age of 17 he had become an officer of the king’s guard…
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RESILIENCE
Yulianna Avdeeva, piano. Music of Szpilman, Shostakovich, Weinberg, and Prokofiev PENTATONE [PTC5187073] BACKGROUND Pianist Yulianna Avdeeva – who gained worldwide recognition at the 2010 Chopin Competition, where she won First Prize, makes her Pentatone debut with Resilience. Comprising Władysław Szpilman’s Mazurek and Suite “The Life of the Machines,” along with sonatas by Shostakovich, Weinberg and Prokofiev, the program is dedicated to composers who survived times…
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GRIT AND HEART
THE MUSIC Canção de Maria – Maria’s Song Avós – Grandparents Mentir – To lie Se te adormeces (Cordeiro Divino) – If you sleep (Divine Lamb) La Noche Granda (Chabuca) – Granda’s Night Maria Scheherezade Como se de súbito – As if suddenly Fas-te deusa de ti – Make a goddess of yourself Santiago No…
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ISTRIAN RHAPSODY
Dejan Lazić’s playing of his own Concerto in Istrian Style for Piano and Orchestra is as memorable as the music itself. The work opens rhythmically with an overture in which the piano emerges triumphant in a series of exchanges with the orchestra. A moodily sad second movement the composer titles Intermezzo, alternates hints of dissonance…
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DAVID OISTRAHK, VIOLIN
BACKGROUND The Ukrainian violinist David Oistrakh was born to a Jewish family in 1908 in Odessa, where he made his first public appearance at the age of six, and where he studied at the Odessa Conservatory until he was twenty years old. He then taught at the Moscow Conservatory and in 1937 he won the…
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