The blog for the Celebrity Series of Boston- a Boston based arts organization which presents an annual concert series. Here you can find news about our season, local and international arts, and much more! www.celebrityseries.org
November has been a busy month here at Celebrity Series world headquarters. Below are just a few of the reviews for just a few of the performances this month ...
Angelika Kirchschlager and Jean-Yves Thibaudet at NEC's Jordan Hall:
Orion String Quartet with David Shifrin
(performance included Boston premiere of Marc Neikrug's Clarinet Quintet)
Bela Fleck and the Flecktones at Sanders Theatre:
Itzhak Perlman at Symphony Hall:
The IceMusic Festival web site
Boston Globe/Boston.com (preview)
Maya Beiser, World to Come (April 23, Paramount Theatre)Both Marcia Siegel's Mozart Dances review and Lloyd Schwartz's Mozart Dances and Christian Tetzlaff reviews are already online in advance of hitting the streets in tomorrow's edition of the Phoenix. Here are the links to their columns:
Marcia Siegel - Squiggles and LinesLloyd Schwartz - Stopping Time
Our own Rob Kapilow (well, he's been doing shows with us for quite some time, so he feels like family) undertook an interesting project a few years ago, a commission to create a work that is "a reflection of the enduring legacy of the Lewis and Clark expedition." But the commission from the St. Louis Symphony, the Louisiana Philharmonic and the Kansas City Symphony was not specific as to how this might be accomplished. For inspiration, Kapilow retraced Lewis and Clark's steps and began confronting what was for him a new world. Kapilow struggles with how to tell this new unexpected story, the story he finds most compelling, and which is largely untold; the story of Lewis and Clark from the perspective of today's native Americans.
On another note, Rob Kapilow performs two versions of his acclaimed What Makes It Great? program in the 2009-2010 season:
What Makes It Great? Mendelssohn Octet
What Makes It Great? The Music of Cole Porter
This project has an air of inevitability to it, but London's Royal Opera House will perform an opera using Twitter contributions for the libretto. Here is a snippet of the AP story:
"In an effort to get more people involved with opera, which sometimes
suffers from an elitist, highbrow reputation, London's world-famous
Royal Opera House is turning away — temporarily — from classic talents
like Giuseppe Verdi and Giacomo Puccini and giving the composer's pen
to ... just about anybody.
All you need to contribute is a
computer or a mobile phone and an account on Twitter, the popular
micro-blogging site that is open to all."
Read all of the Associated Press story.
Random assortment of contributions to date:
"Nuts, i love hazelnuts." Bang! The bird dropped from the sky, dead, its tiny wings were frozen."
"concerns of a nihilist. I would bring you flowers, but they would die. I would love you, but, why?"
"Still in park. Her, shivering with coffee: I’m so cold- let’s leave Boston. Him: Anywhere! Around the world India, then Egypt!"
"but the distance between us is psychological – not physical or intellectual. And what’s happened toooooo the ginger cat?"
"forget! forget! the natives won’t forget! Lovers, mysterious in the mosquito net!!"
View the line-by-line progress of the libretto.
Make a contribution to the libretto (login required).
Visit the Royal Opera House on Twitter (is that close to Covent Garden?)
Royal Opera House web site
The remarkable Israeli cellist Maya Beiser plays "Khse Buon" by Cambodian composer Chinary Ung.
Beiser makes her Celebrity Series debut with a performance of "World to Come" on April 23 at The Paramount Theatre.
It's only a 2-minute excerpt, but cellist Maya Beiser's multi-media performance, "World to Come," doesn't need much time to make an impression. You could call it a solo cello performance, because in one sense it is, but there is quite a bit more going on here visually.
Well I'll be. Eighth blackbird won a Grammy. Read about it here.
There were plenty of other classical music winners (and nominees) with Celebrity Series histories, but eighth blackbird kind of jumped out at me.
Gil Scott-Heron
Jeremy Eichler's review of Saturday evening's Boston Modern Orchestra Project concert begins with a reference to Gil Scott-Heron's famous screed from 1970, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. After reading the entry I first congratulated myself ridiculously for getting the reference, and then thought what a good decision The Globe made in hiring this remarkable critic (and soon to be Dad). I'm not sure just whom I should be congratulating for pulling the trigger on his hire, so I'll throw my thoughts up here and hope that someone is vain enough to Google their professional decisions in search of my validation.
Exhibit A
Gil Scott-Heron, excerpt from The Revolution Will Not Be Televised:
The revolution will not be brought to you by the
Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie
Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.
The revolution will not make you look five pounds
thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, Brother.
The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers; The revolution will be live."
Exhibit B
Jeremy Eichler, from Maestro, is that a DJ with your orchestra? (Note: Neither Mr. Eichler, nor any of the Globe writers, write their own headlines. Just thought you should know, since I'm truly interested in having you visit these links...):
"The revolution in the idea of what an orchestra can be -- from a collective instrument designed for the traditional symphonic repertoire, into an omnivorous agent of the new -- has been underway for well over a decade now, even if it has not been widely televised."
There is also this from the same review:
"Under the poised direction of conductor Gil Rose, BMOP sounded full and fearless throughout the evening. This protean ensemble made sharing the stage with drum kits and electric guitars seem perfectly natural. For these fine players, it probably is."
Read all of Maestro, is that a DJ with your orchestra?
Last, but by no means least, Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky has posted some photos from the evening on his web site.
Gil Rose and DJ Spooky rehearse Anthony DeRitis' Devolution on Friday, May 18 at Sanders Theatre while James Otis looms in the foreground (full disclosure: in case it isn't obvious...this photo was taken by yours truly, not by a Globe or Herald pro)
The concert is over now, but the Boston Modern Orchestra Project's Saturday night performance at Sanders Theatre, part of our Boston Marquee series, got quite a bit of attention (deservedly so, of course) from local media, including Boston's two major daily newspapers (which two are the "major" daily newspapers, you ask, knowing there are several Boston papers issued daily? The answer is: the ones with their own zip codes are the majors, ok?).
The Boston Globe weighed in with Matthew Guerrieri's Roll Over Beethoven from page one of Friday's Living/Arts section. Matthew followed up, admirably and typically, on his blog, Soho the Dog with a few bits that ended up on the cutting room floor. I love that he does this. Why should those tasty bits of interview wisdom end up as butcher's leftovers to be made into journalistic scrapple, or worse, not made into anything. Serve while fresh, I say.
Keith Powers was next with his Boston Herald entry on Saturday, Modern orchestra blooms with Rose. Considering this paper's troubles of late, the effort was especially noteworthy. Kudos.
Cannonball Adderly once famously said of (some) New York jazz audiences, "You get a lot of people that are supposed to be hip, and they act like they're supposed to be hip, which makes a difference." Cannonball eventually found his really hip New York audience at a matinee performance at New York's Village Vanguard, and while recording there, told the house, "Hipness is not a state of mind, it's a fact of life. You don't decide to be hip, it just happens that way." With our Boston Marquee performance by BMOP, the Celebrity Series skipped the trial and error and managed to find something authentically hip. "Hip" in the sense that the event was authentic and it mattered (don't ask me what that means exactly, the audience could feel it). The concert featured the world premiere of Evan Ziporyn's Celebrity Series commission, Hard Drive, the North American premiere of Steven Mackey's Dreamhouse, and Anthony DeRitis' collaboration with DJ Spooky, Devolution, so it was bound to be perceived by many as something that "mattered." In actual performance, not only was it supposed to matter, it did matter. More than a state of mind, it was a fact of life.
