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Help Tenores de Aterúe get to Sardinia, a Kickstarter Campaign. Give Generously!(1)
Hello Everyone,
Tenores de Aterúe have just launched a Kickstarter fundraising campaign to help us realize our goals for our first trip to Sardinia! We are planning a trip there this Spring, and we’ve raised about half of what we need to cover our expenses. We’re relying on your support to help us cross the finish line! Please visit our Kickstarter page, where you can see our video and read all the information detailing what we’ve got planned, and why your support is crucial. Thanks so much & please spread the word! With your help we can continue to promote Sardinia’s amazing traditional culture and bring more wonderful music to you at future concerts! Here’s the link: http://kck.st/104i4Fr
Yours in Song and Optimism!
Avery, Carl, Gideon & Doug
Tenores de Aterúe
Philippe Jaroussky Sings Handel and Porpora Arias with the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, plus Locatelli’s L’Arte del Violino in Sydney
The challenge, the risk of counter-tenor singing, still fairly young as a revived technique, seems to appeal to modern audiences; it is a peculiar type of virtuosity just by virtue of the technique. It is only natural that the the counter-tenor revival took off in the 1950’s and developed in parallel with the historical performance practice movement. That was Alfred Deller who helped it take off, who started as a boy in a choir in the 1920’s and as an adult helped the Purcell revival in singing alto, and gave recitals of Italian madrigals and Elizabethan songs, but also singing contemporary opera, creating the role of Oberon for Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream.[1. See J. B. Steane writing for Grove Music Online.] Philippe Jaroussky cites Deller’s very distinctive voice, and also James Bowman, who too inspired Britten, creating the role of Apollo for Death in Venice, as voices he listened to in forming his own, and forming as an artist, Bowman especially. Bowman gave his farewell concert in Paris only last November, and many good recordings exist of Deller. Now with some hundreds of professional counter-tenors in the world and they inching up into the soprano range, the hole in the Baroque and classical “instrumentarium” left by the extremely distinctive and castrato voice which tickled so much enthusiasm in audiences — and composers — in the 17th and 18th century is filling, or at least better circumscribed, without needing to resort to a false general preference or dichotomy determined by fashions between counter-tenors and sopranos en travestie, in recital or in opera, or between counter-tenors and contraltos.
The Amazing Daniil Trifonov with The Russian National Orchestra
One of the joys with a visiting orchestra is to experience new sonorities—to be swept richly downward, perhaps, to unanticipated string depths—to hear brass playing grainier or more golden than you thought possible in the hall—or wind passages lighter and more personal than you might have dreamed. More importantly, you come to sense the ensemble’s psychology, as individual in its way as the conductor’s. Listen to an orchestra like the Mariinsky, and you experience shivers of delight. How Russian it seems!
Who to Direct the BSO? And Reviews of Recent Concerts: Alan Gilbert Conducts Dutilleux, Stravinsky, Ravel, Tchaikovsky, Daniele Gatti conducts Verdi’s Requiem and Paul Lewis in Recital at Jordan Hall Plays Schubert’s Last Three Sonatas
The Boston Symphony Orchestra is up and running and sounding very good after its holiday time off. New York Philharmonic music director Alan Gilbert opened the winter season with a concert series beginning January 10th. Best of all was the opening work, Henri Dutilleux’s Métaboles of 1965, a piece in five movements played without pause for large orchestra, with much brass and percussion, harp and celesta. The piece is listenable and attractive, rich and serious, and full of musical wit. It asks and rewards an audience’s focus and concentration, which came about well on this occasion. The presentation made a case for what has often occurred to me, that challenging or relatively new work often goes over best when placed first on a program — people tend to be fresh and attentive and open. Métaboles proceeds by constant change and transformation of basic material, and one finds oneself every few minutes, taken unawares, as it were, in quite new territory — a new realm of orchestral color, of breadth of phrase, of rhythm — all of which has grown seamlessly out of what proceeded. The music sounds at moments like Messiaen or Stravinsky, but moves with the mercurial quality of Elliott Carter, or Mozart. Gilbert and the orchestra put the work across with freshness and commitment.
More in this category
- Renée Fleming Joins the San Francisco Symphony in Music of Debussy, Holloway and Canteloube
- Christmas Music As It Was Meant to Be: Noël! Noël! with the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra
- Jonas Alber conducts the Staatsorchester Braunschweig in Franck’s D Minor Symphony—a Podcast.
- An Awesome Trek Through the Cosmos with the Pinchgut Opera’s ‘Castor et Pollux’ by Rameau