A Superconductive Summer

A quick note to our loyal readers.

Well, a bunch of notes.

Hi folks,

As it's now June, you might have noticed that offerings on Superconductor have gotten thinner this month. Carnegie Hall is closed for the summer, as is the Metropolitan Opera. 

As summer marches in, there's much to be happy about. The New York Philharmonic is still going strong, with an exciting slate of concerts this month, culminating in Philharmonic 360, a concert at the Park Avenue Armory celebrating the unlikely confluence of Mozart and Stockhausen. Smaller opera companies are staging...well, smaller opera productions. 

 The summer festival season is almost on us.

Opera Review: Magic on a Budget

The Magic Flute at Regina Opera.

by Paul Pelkonen

An original set design for Act I of The Magic Flute.

For the last 42 years, Brooklyn's Regina Opera has been serving up the best of the repertory to enthusiastic audiences in a church hall in Dyker Heights. On Sunday afternoon, the company gave the second of four performances of Mozart's The Magic Flute, offered here in a sturdy, serviceable English translation.

Despite being one of Mozart's most popular operas, the fantastical Flute suffers from over-familiarity and the misperception that the simple story is aimed exclusively at children. The Regina players presented a version that spoke clearly to all generations in the audience, making the opera's two love stories come across as genuine while indulging in the work's mystic pretense.

Concert Review: Middle Ages, Spread

The Philharmonic takes on Carmina Burana.

The caption reads: "Virtue lies defeated."
(Note the wheel in the background.)
From El Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Réverte,
© 1993 Random House.

by Paul J. Pelkonen
The performance of choral music is not the primary mission of the New York Philharmonic. In its long history, the orchestra has taken advantage of skilled choral ensembles and music directors (Leonard Bernstein, Kurt Masur) with a penchant for choral repertory.

On Thursday night, the Philharmonic presented the first of three concerts led by Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, a veteran conductor acclaimed for his interpretations of choral and dramatic music. The program paired Atlantide, the final, unfinished cantata by Manuel de Falla, with Carl Orff's mighty Carmina Burana, an audience favorite. This was the orchestra's first performance of the Orff work since 1995.

In the interests of time and authenticity, Mr. Frühbeck chose to present Falla's completed, performable sketches instead of the whole three-act work. Atlantide requires two pianos and lush orchestration for its rich portrait of ocean exploration and the journeys of Christopher Columbus. Juilliard-trained soprano Emalie Savoy sang the pivotal Queen Elizabeth with rage and inner magnetism. However, despite the conductor's best efforts, the disconnected segments of the cantata failed to jell into a dramatic whole.

Concert Review: The Return of the Flash

Lang Lang at Carnegie Hall.

by Paul J. Pelkonen

Lang Lang. Photo by Felix Broede for Deutsche Grammophon. © 2011 Universal Classics.

The pianist Lang Lang is a formidable talent. At Tuesday night's recital at Carnegie Hall, the last major subscription concert of the 2012 season, Mr. Lang gave a performance that favored style over musical substance.

Mr. Lang has made no secret of his idolization of Franz Liszt, even releasing a Sony collection called My Piano Hero. His playing is not just Lisztian in its prodigious technical ability--he also incorporates a free-form, Romantic approach to tempo and structure. Here, he offered works Bach, Schubert and Chopin. While the written notes were always played, this concert seemed to err, if it can be said, on the side of virtuosity.