The Frick Collection’s Sunday afternoon concerts are often portals into European music making, presenting one debut after another of artists for whom a larger U.S. presence has been stymied by post-9/11 security hassles. But on Sunday’s April 14th respite from tax deadlines, the Bennewitz Quartet went rather further by entering a temporary time warp – fitting for a venue that, … [Read more...] about Bennewitz Quartet: Young musicians with eternal hindsight

Danish composer Poul Ruders (b. 1949) made a post-Easter sweep through the northeast U.S. – though it didn’t feel brief in the least and was never likely to. “He strikes a huge stride over all kinds of music. Light, dark, contrapuntal, monophonic, high and low registers ... he revels in extreme contrasts. And like a tight-rope artist, he’s also an entertainer,” said … [Read more...] about Poul Ruders at Curtis and N.Y. Phil: Transcending notes, rests and contradictions

The pickup truck pulled up alongside me and my bicycle on 47th Street in need of directions: “Where’s that street with all the strip clubs?” “You’re asking the wrong guy,” I said. And before I could disqualify myself by claiming to be gay, the driver’s head snapped the other direction and was off. In retrospect, that moment began my karmic payback for being so dismissive … [Read more...] about Cavalli’s Eliogabalo: An opera that needed rescuing…out of The Box

“Beauty makes me sad,” said Steven Mackey, threatening to take a Byronic turn. “If you can’t have sex with it or eat it, what good is it? “Maybe that’s why people invented picnics. If they can’t eat it [beauty] they can at least eat in its presence.” So said the Princeton-based composer by way of introducing his piece Groundswell to the audience at American Modern … [Read more...] about Gloriously useless beauty on a rainy New York night

With any luck, Van Cliburn lived to watch the Oscars one last time. The legendary pianist, who died Wednesday at age 78 after a long struggle with liver cancer, was that kind of guy. In the years after his 1978 retirement from full-time concertizing, the way to engage him was not with some erudite conversation about music – such things seemed to pain him – but to discuss the … [Read more...] about Van Cliburn and his fraught generation