Leah Stein, a dancer and teacher, has created a site-specific dance performance for Fringe 2018 outdoors on the grounds of the Woodmere Art Museum in Chestnut Hill. The show uses three different sites and the seating was on moist bales of hay and a few stone benches, so creature comfort was not a salient feature.… Continue reading Fringe Review: Ground Works at the Woodmere Art Museum–making sculptures dance and sing for Fringe 2018
Charles Abramovic, Chair of keyboard studies at Temple University, is an experienced teacher whose gift for interpreting modern music is extraordinary. The program he created for his Philadelphia Young Pianists’ Academy was almost an essay on the history of piano composition. The two outer pieces were written by composers born in 1938. The opening piece… Continue reading Concert Review: Charles Abramovic Recital for the Philadelphia Young Pianists’ Academy
Chinese writer/director Han Yan took a major gamble on his latest sci-fi manga movie, Dongxu shijie, (Animal World) by putting an American musical twist to a best-selling Japanese manga series, Kaiji, the ultimate survivor by Nobuyuki Fukumoto. The June 2018 premiere at the Shanghai International Film Festival proved the gamble to be a winning choice.… Continue reading Music Review: Animal World score by Michael Tuller and Neal Acree
The Philadelphia Orchestra concerts at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts are wonderful for many reasons, but on Wednesday, July 18, the weather was perfect and the Mann was full of young families with picnics and many patrons who do not ordinarily go for the more formal atmosphere at the Kimmel Center’s Verizon Hall.… Continue reading Concert Review: Bernstein, Broadway and Beyond! at the Mann Center
Sad it was to conclude the MONTH OF MODERNS as the Crossing Choir fell silent about 65 minutes after starting Kile Smith’s setting of the words and poems of Robert Lax. Sad because this chamber choir and its conductor, Donald Nally, are so enthusiastic about new music you can feel it when they perform and… Continue reading Concert Review: The Crossing’s MONTH OF MODERNS 3 – The Arc in the Sky
Concerts like this are magical – something really worked for both settings of the enigmatic poem, Voyages, by Hart Crane. At the pre-concert lecture, Robert Convery told us he set the entire poem in eight days. On the score, he had noted the date June 16, 1993, twenty-five years and one day prior to the… Continue reading Concert Review: The Crossing’s MONTH OF MODERNS 2: Voyages
When I heard the cut “Pastorale (for Robert Schumann)” on the album, Solo Fred Hersch, I could not believe my ears. The music was Robert Schumann, but sounded as if Schumann was doodling in a jazzy way with a smooth legato line, dynamic finesse, and impeccable phrasing. I immediately became a Fred Hersch fan. The… Continue reading Concert Review: The Fred Hersch Trio at the McCarter Jazz Festival
