Concert Review: All About the Benjamin

The Orchestra of St. Luke's explores the modern British composers.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Chillin' with Pablo: Orchestra of St. Luke's principal conductor Pablo Heras-Casado
takes a backstage break. Photo by Felix Broede from hs website. 

The British composer George Benjamin has emerged as an important voice in the 21st century, with his opera Written on Skin and instrumental works gaining in popularity and performance. On Sunday afternoon, conductor Pablo Heras-Casado and the Orchestra of St. Luke's offered its second program of the current NY PHIL BIENNIAL, exploring works by Mr, Benjamin, this year's Musical America composer of the year, and other composers who are his influences and followers in the current flowering of contemporary British music.

Concert Review: The Last and the Biggest

The Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra returns to Carnegie Hall.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Balancing act: conductor Mariss Jansons brought the
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra back to Carnegie Hall this week.
Photo from the orchestra's official site, © 2014 Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Although the concert season at Carnegie Hall is breathing its last, Friday night marked the return of one of Germany's greatest orchestras to that historic venue. This was the first of three performances this week featuring the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Mariss Jansons. The program featured concert hall standard by Richard Strauss and Hector Berlioz, preceded by the first Carnegie Hall premiere of John Adams' 1996 work Slonimsky's Earbox.

Opera Review: East Side Story

The New York Opera Exchange presents Romeo et Juliette.
by Ellen Fishbein, special to Superconductor.

Kendra Berentsen (left) and Scott Ingham star in Romeo et Juliette.
Photo courtesy New York Opera Exchange.

On Sunday evening, the fledgling New York Opera Exchange explored French repertory with a charming production of Romeo et Juliette, the five-act adaptation of Shakespeare's play by composer Charles Gounod. The production was mounted at the Unitarian Church of All Souls on Lexington Avenue. Though beautiful, the space was a risky choice: sound resonated freely in the room, but so did  mistakes. A few hiccups in the overture gave way to a consistent performance from the orchestra, which navigated Gounod’s delicate dissonances smoothly under conductor David Liebowitz.

Opera Review: Destination: Nowhere

Washington National Opera takes on La Forza del Destino.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

She wants YOU: Preziosilla (Ketevan Kemoklidze) summons the troops in La Forza del Destino.

Photo by Scott Suchman © 2013 Washington National Opera/The Kennedy Center.

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It is a bold stroke for new Washington National Opera artistic director Francesca Zambello to tackle Giuseppe Verdi's La Forza del Destino in a new production for the composer's bicentennial year. Forza is Verdi's great theatrical experiment, crossing a Spanish revenge tragedy with the sprawling worldview of a Schiller play. The sprawling plot gleefully demands abandonment of Aristotelian unities (and even logic) to tell a story that amounts to an interconnected series of unfortunate events. It is also the opera world's equivalent of Shakespeare's Macbeth. Whispered backstage stories tell of ill fortune--even death--befalling those who dare to sing its three leading roles.