What concerts are you looking forward to? (Part II)

[Que]

Attending a concert by Dionysos Now! tomorrow at the Early Music Festival in Utrecht, that has started today:

https://oudemuziek.nl/en/concert-calendar/alle-concerten-20252026/fom25-32-dionysos-now/31-aug-domkerk-1700/


I also booked concerts on Wednesday and Friday - watch this space...

[brewski]

Attending a concert by Dionysos Now! tomorrow at the Early Music Festival in Utrecht, that has started today:

https://oudemuziek.nl/en/concert-calendar/alle-concerten-20252026/fom25-32-dionysos-now/31-aug-domkerk-1700/


I also booked concerts on Wednesday and Friday - watch this space...

That looks fantastic. Love the venue!

[André]

The Met (Opera House) held some kind of annual singing contest recently (« Laffont Grand Finals Concert »), which I caught on the wings in the car today. I was impressed with what I've heard. All kinds of voices from different places, most of them from the USA. I missed the intro to the program, so it may have been a mostly American thing. In any case, what counts is that i got to hear some quite fine voices - and some 'aspiring' but likely not to go any further ones. My favourite was a powerful, deep mezzo/almost contralto singer named Lauren Randolph. She sang Handel (Dejanira's aria) and Strauss (Ariadne auf Naxos, the Composer's aria). She did win some kind of prize, but not the mot prestigious ones. Among the latter was a tenor who thought it was a good idea to sing 'Asile héréditaire' (Rossini's Guillaume tell) and 'Ah mes amis, quel jour de fête' (Donizetti's La Fille du régiment)  in full chest voice - which of course tinged his high Cs with a definitely baritonal resonance. He'll be lucky if he can last as a fish market seller 10 years from now. Sorry for the clumped paragraph, my 'tab' separator doesn't respond to my increasingly annoyed  commands. Time to reboot.

[brewski]

Today at 4 pm (EDT), the three string quartet finalists at Banff will present their own 45-minute programs. I would love to have been a fly on the wall during those discussions.

Arete Quartet (Seoul)
Britten: Three Divertimenti for String Quartet
Mozart: String Quartet No. 19 in C Major, K 465 – Adagio - Allegro
Janáček: String Quartet No. 1 "Kreutzer Sonata"

Quartet KAIRI (Salzburg)
Mozart: String Quartet No. 21 in D Major, K. 575 – Allegretto, Allegretto
Takemitsu: Landscape
Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, Op. 110

Poiesis Quartet (Cincinnati)
Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate: Pisachi (Reveal) for String Quartet
Brian Raphael Nabors: String Quartet
Joe Hisaishi: String Quartet No. 1 – Phosphorescent Sea
Kevin Lau: String Quartet No. 7, Surfacing

Livestream on the Violin Channel here.

[Brian]

Whoa at the boldness of that third program.

[brewski]

Right? Zero usual suspects. All week, the group has impressed, and I'm glad they made it to the final round.

[Florestan]

While strolling along the pedestrian main street of Saint-Jean-de-Luz on the French Basque Coast this evening, I noticed that the town's (charming) church was closed  for a concert (Thomas Adès conducting his own music and works by Ravel, with the Paris Opera Orchestra).

It turns out this was part of a Ravel festival in the region, and as I'll be around again on Monday evening (on my way back home from the Bordeaux area), I've just bought tickets for an all-Ravel programme to be performed at the 17th-century church of the small town of Urrugne. Mezzo Fleur Barron, cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras, violinist Clara-Jumi Kang, flautist Aliya Vodovozava, and pianists Bertrand Chamayou and Kirill Gerstein will perform Histoires naturelles, Chansons Madécasses, the two violin sonatas , and the piano duo version of La Valse.

This is where the concert will be held:

Crackerjack!

[Que]

Wednesday evening another Pierre de la Rue concert, this time by Cappella Pratensis

https://oudemuziek.nl/en/concert-calendar/alle-concerten-20252026/fom25-62-cappella-pratensis/3-sep-domkerk-1700/



Later in the evening, a harpsichord recital by Jean Rondeau playing Louis Couperin:

https://oudemuziek.nl/en/concert-calendar/alle-concerten-20252026/fom25-65-jean-rondeau/3-sep-lutherse-kerk-2000/

[Florestan]

Wednesday evening another Pierre de la Rue concert, this time by Cappella Pratensis

https://oudemuziek.nl/en/concert-calendar/alle-concerten-20252026/fom25-62-cappella-pratensis/3-sep-domkerk-1700/



Later in the evening, a harpsichord recital by Jean Rondeau playing Louis Couperin:

https://oudemuziek.nl/en/concert-calendar/alle-concerten-20252026/fom25-65-jean-rondeau/3-sep-lutherse-kerk-2000/

Looks like you'll have a great time on both occasions.

[Wanderer]

Next month, at the always worthwhile Piraeus St. annex of the Benaki Museum:

Scriabin: Préludes Op. 11, Nos. 13-24
Scriabin: Fantaisie in B minor, Op. 28
Chopin: Fantaisie in F minor, Op. 49
Brahms: Piano Sonata in F minor, No. 3, Op. 5

Łukasz Krupiński, piano
Μουσείο Μπενάκη - Πολιτιστικό Κέντρο οδού Πειραιώς

[ritter]

...I've just bought tickets for an all-Ravel programme to be performed at the 17th-century church of the small town of Urrugne. Mezzo Fleur Barron, cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras, violinist Clara-Jumi Kang, flautist Aliya Vodovozava, and pianists Bertrand Chamayou and Kirill Gerstein will perform Histoires naturelles, Chansons Madécasses, the two violin sonatas , and the piano duo version of La Valse.

A quick note to say that the concert in Urrugne (next to Saint-Jean-de-Luz) on Monday evening was quite magical. I was completely won over by Clara-Jumi Kang in the two violin sonatas. She has such a soft, at times almost whispering tone, and it suits the music like a glove. I've always had a sort of (inexplicable) aversion to the violin sonata as a genre, but Ravel's are now clearly works I love (particularly the posthumous one).

A nice meta-musical touch was that when the Sonata No. 2 was being played, from our seats in the second gallery of the church, we could see through the narrow window on the wall opposite from us how dusk fell on the town outside and the hills in the distance, with the sky adopting gradually darker shades of blue. Very fitting with the Blues second movement ; L'heure bleue turning into an heure exquise.

The chamber music component of the Chansons madécasses becomes much more apparent in live performance, with the voice (the seductive Fleur Barron) and the instrumentalists (all of them superb, but Queyras being in a class of his own) interacting as a quartet of equals.

The piano parts in the whole pieces in the programme were performed by Kirill Gerstein, who was joined by Chamayou only for La Valse to close the evening. I must admit that I much prefer the orchestral version of La Valse to the two-piano reduction. Where the former is mysterious and phantasmagorical, the latter is more grotesque and aggressive. But even in this "black and white" version, La Valse it remains a great composition.

Chamayou is the director of the festival, and his brief appearance in the concert on Tuesday evening is justified by the fact that on the following afternoon he was giving a concert of the (almost) complete solo piano music of Ravel (joined by a soloist of the Ravel Academy, Hyunji Kim, in the earlier and shorter pieces), along with some pieces in homage to the composer he included in his recent CD.

The two works absent from that afternoon concert were Miroirs and Gaspard de la nuit, because later that evening none other than Pierre-Laurent Aimard repeated the Ravel / Boulez programme I saw him perform in Madrid earlier this year. Unfortunately, we had other engagements and could not attend either session (these were held in the church of Ravel's birthplace Ciboure).

[Florestan]

A nice meta-musical touch was that when the Second Sonata was being played, from our seats in the second gallery of the church, we could see through the narrow window on the wall opposed from us how dusk fell on the town outside and the hills in the distance, with the sky adopting gradually darker shades of blue. Very fitting with the Blues second movement; L'heure bleue turning into an heure exquise.

Ô temps, suspends ton vol! et vous, heures propices,
Suspendez votre cours!
Laissez-nous savourer les rapides délices
Des plus beaux de nos jours!

[Que]

Tonight a concert by the Huelgas Ensemble:

https://oudemuziek.nl/en/concert-calendar/alle-concerten-20252026/fom25-84-huelgas-ensemble/5-sep-domkerk-1700/