118 stories by "Jean Ballard Terepka"
It was a Tallis-perfect performance. Palestrina has long been one of the most sure-fire dazzling jewels in the Tallis Scholars' treasury. In writing sacred music, Palestrina made his particu…
For those who could not understand the lyrics of Traore's songs " he sang in Mali's French " each song was an experience of four interconnected musical sounds: the calabash thump and click r…
The consistency " the from-the-very-beginning wholeness " of Bach's genius was clear in this chronological arrangement. The kinds of writing techniques and subjects " the sequences and suspe…
Joined by percussionist John Ferrari and conductor Jeffrey Means, the five members of the Da Capo Chamber Players " Curtis Macomber/violin, Chris Gross/cello, Patricia Spencer/flute, Meighan…
Performed the evening before the American election, the theme and purpose of the concert " remembrance of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., two "outstanding stewards of humanity,"…
From the very first opening bars of the "Chaos" overture, Hyde set the tone for the evening: conducting with gentlemanly authoritativeness, Hyde led the Orchestra of St. Luke's " who were al…
In the first concert of the 2016-2017 Composer Portraits season at Columbia University School of the Arts' Miller Theatre, current music of American composer John Zorn (b. 1953), including f…
The performance of Verdi's "La Traviata" featuring Bonnie Frauenthal as Violetta and Jose Heredia as Alfredo Germont was wonderful in many ways. Frauenthal sang and acted her complex role co…
Over the last several years, PRISM and two colleague chamber groups, SÅ Percussion on the one hand and PARTCH on the other, have been engaged in the "Color Theory" project, and presented…
C4 has always been driven by certain core values and goals; the particular repertoire "cornerstones" being emphasized this season, as indicated in the concert's program notes, were importan…
In the program notes and in informal remarks to the audience, Ochsner encouraged the audience to listen to all the works as music inspired by nature; this theme proved to be a useful organiz…
Such feast days deserve magnificent music; Bach and Handel created it. And the Saint Thomas Choir of Men and Boys, the first rate period-instruments Concert Royal, and five marvelous soloist…
Price, Bottoms, Richardson and Courville are all strong, clear singers; they were well matched in this performance, alert to each other's pacing and responsive to each other's sensibilities.…
In the hands of less virtuosic musicians, Ligeti's material can spin out of control. Kigawa, Choi and Drehmann, however, from the very opening, invited the audience into an experience of lis…
Since the 1670's, the Choir has consisted of voices ranging from bass to treble, all students at St. John's College or the College School. There are currently six basses, five tenors, four c…
The Douglas-Westerlies music, whether its subject is lament or celebration, protest or affirmation, is artistically coherent: testing and stretching traditional genres, the music is about fo…
And Ensemble Pamplemousse, an exciting and distinctive six-member "composer performer collective" founded in 2003, and performing at Miller Theatre for the first time, had all sorts of fine …
The last piece of the concert was James MacMillan's substantive and moving 1994 "Seven Last Words from the Cross," a 35 minute piece of seven different movements, varying in length from nine…
For the winter concert of their eleventh season, the twenty-three member C4: The Choral Composer Conductor Collective " elected to honor "Unusual - music of the strange, the absurd, the surr…
The evening was less about contemporary Romanian composer Dumitrescu, born in 1944, than about the music for which he is, in some mysterious sense, a medium. Each work is unique, each a prem…
In the compositions of New York composer Alex Mincek (b. 1975), music is explored by means of separating out its constitutive elements: as indicated in Miller Theatre program notes for his C…
The most psychologically complex role is Silvia's. Over the course of the opera, she moves from childlike naïveté to loving generosity of heart. Energetic and intelligent, she unlearns …
The gifted puppeteer-dancers " Kristen Kammermeyer, Brendan McMahon, Justin Perkins, Rachael Shane " were barefoot and dressed in black; they moved with graceful economy of movement and made…
Mahanthappa's elegant and exciting compositional voice is well established. His jazz combines the full development of the genre since its inception with the idiom of South Indian classical m…
At the 10:00 show on Wednesday, December 9, Welch played bagpipes with Brendon Randall-Myers on electric guitar and Brian Chase on drums and electronics performing "The Library of Babel," a …
