Concert Review: A Feast With no Stuffing

Jaap van Zweden conducts the New York Philharmonic.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Score! Jaap von Zweden on the podium.
Photo by Hans van der Woerde, courtesy IMG Artists.

Sometimes in the middle of a season, you need to hear a fresh approach. That maxim may have been in the mind of New York Philharmonic administrators when they booked Dutch conductor Jaap van Zweden for two weeks this year. Mr. van Zweden has garnered awards in his run as music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. He brings a brisk clarity to the music, and as Wednesday night's concert showed, the players responded with alacrity.

Metropolitan Opera Preview: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg

The six-hour echt Deutsch Wagner comedy returns.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

The South African tenor Johan Botha returns in Die Meistersinger.
Photo © 2007 The Metropolitan Opera courtesy the Metropolitan Opera Press Department.

Of the ten major Richard Wagner operas, only one is a comedy. And it's the six-hour Meistersinger: a celebration of all things German.

Opera Review: Fezzes Are Cool

Juilliard Opera takes on Rossini's Il Turco in Italia.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Hyesang Park as Fiorilla in Il Turco in Italia.
Photo by Ken Howard © 2014 The Juilliard School.

The Juilliard Opera opened its 2014 season this week with a new production of Rossini's Il Turco in Italia, a genial comedy of manners that never caught fire with the opera-going public of the composer's day. Turco was viewed as an inferior sequel to the composer's wildly successful L'Italiana in Algeri and its libretto, chronicling the bed-hopping adventures of a licentious and married woman at a resort near Naples was considered immoral in Rossini's day. And it is a rarity: this was the first fully staged New York performance of the score since a New York City Opera production from 1978.

Concert Review: The Weight of the War

Jaap van Zweden leads the Shostakovich Eighth. 
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Conductor Jaap van Zweden returned to the New York Philharmonic.
Photo © 2014 The Dallas Symphony Orchestra

The Dutch conductor Jaap van Zweden has built a steady reputation in recent years, both with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra (where he serves as music director) and a series of yearly guest visits to the New York Philharmonic. On Friday afternoon, Mr. van Zweiden led the latter orchestra in a program of Mozart and Shostakovich, contrasting the former's Sinfonia Concertante with the latter's heavyweight Symphony No. 8.