Feast of Music

Broadway Chamber Players: "Black and Blue" at St. Malachy's

by Robert Leeper

Photo credit: Broadway Chamber Players

For the musicians that haunt the orchestra pits of some of New York's biggest theaters, versatility is key: These pros read like the New York Phil, swing like the Jazz Standard, and are constantly learning pieces on the fly for harried directors and hard-nosed producers. These characteristics are becoming increasingly common among chamber groups as well, making Broadway Chamber Players an organically occurring group in the New York chamber-music scene.

Monday's performance brought four of Broadway's top woodwind doublers to St. Malachy's – The Actors' Chapel for a program dubbed "Black and Blue"—named after the Broadway musical celebrating Jazz Age music and dance in Paris between the world wars. It was a promising performance and hopefully the sign of a group capable of equally polished and developed programming in its future. The loose conglomeration of pieces displayed a wide range of talents and areas of interests, but the rapid transitions from one piece to the next left little space for reflection during a piece and even less time to sink into any one mood.

The highlight of the evening was no doubt Billy Kerr's evocative arrangement of Billy Strayhorn's "Lush Life" for saxophone quartet. The impressionistic, chromatic musings were enhanced by the saxophones timbres, which melded effortlessly into one another and added a haunting new angle to the beloved classic.

Preview: Broadway Chamber Players at St. Malachy's – "The Actors' Chapel"

After a fanstastic debut performance at St. Patrick's Cathedral in January, Broadway Chamber Players is bringing their musicians' Broadway chops to the classical scene once more, this Monday, April 14, at 5:30 p.m. Staying a bit closer to home than their last presentation, "Black and Blue" will bring the jazz-inflected music of Gershwin, Wiedoeft, Milhaud, and more to the Theater District's St. Malachy's—commonly reffered to as "The Actors' Chapel."

Tickets start at $10.00, and are available here. And frankly—you're not going to hear these accomplished reed doublers play their regular gigs in the pits of Wicked, Matilda, Aladdin, or Cinderella for any less than that!

The Tallis Scholars Proves Redundant at Church of St. Mary the Virgin

by Michael Cirigliano II

Photo credit: Matthew Murphy

For everything The Tallis Scholars has achieved in its niche market of Renaissance polyphony, it must also be terribly constricting to work within such a singular musical form. Founded by director Peter Phillips 40 years ago, the English group has become synonymous with the choral music of 15th- and 16th-century Europe, consistently setting the standards for the repertoire in terms of both musicological scholarship and performance style. But whereas other "period" ensembles can traverse a wide range of musical styles within a single period—think of John Eliot Gardiner's Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique, who perform works ranging from courtly Beethoven through to fiery Verdi—Renaissance polyphony isn't as diverse a genre, which can leave an entire program feeling a bit redundant.

Such was the case with The Tallis Scholars' performance at Times Square's Church of St. Mary the Virgin Saturday night, this season's final installment of Miller Theatre's Early Music series. With works from Josquin Desprez, Cipriano de Rore, John Sheppard, Michael Nyman, and the group's eponymous composer, Thomas Tallis, the two-hour-plus evening provided consistently high musical standards but couldn't produce the highs and lows needed for a true musical journey.

Desprez's Praeter rerum seriem, a Christmas motet written during the composer's late period, began the program, an interesting work that presents a simple plainchant melody before quickly morphing into ever-evolving permutations that leave the opening strain almost unrecognizable by the work's end. Despite the boomy acoustics in the church, the ensemble's sense of timing and articulation was pristine—no small feat given the dense construction of the material and the intricate canons laced throughout.

FREE TICKETS: Munich Philharmonic Orchestra at Carnegie Hall

NOTE: This contest has ended.

Fabio Luisi (of the Metropolitan Opera) conducts the Munich Philharmonic in an intensely romantic all-Strauss program this Saturday night at Carnegie Hall and FoM is giving away two free pairs of tickets to the show! 

The program includes the Der Rosenkavalier orchestral suite, Ein Heldeleben, and soprano Karita Mattila joins for Strauss' Four Last Poems. 

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Kronos Quartet Asserts Their Reign in Carnegie Hall 40th-Anniversary Concert

by Jacob Ryan

Photo credit: Steve J. Sherman, Carnegie Hall

The Kronos Quartet's 40th-anniversary concert last Friday night at Carnegie Hall started with a guest appearance by Big Bird—which, I suppose, shouldn't have been all that shocking.

Big Bird appeared in an opening video by Sam Green that highlighted the quartet's 40-year history, including their appearance on Sesame Street. Newspaper clippings fluttered across the screen, accomplishments rolled over one another, clamoring for attention, and new quartet members came and went. It was a lovely review, and when the actual quartet walked on stage after the video was over, they were greeted to an incredibly warm reception. The applause the group received communicated something deeper than the standard ecstatic rush of an energized audience: It was a more profound appreciation brought on by long-term satisfaction, the kind of applause that can only be earned after decades of consistently fresh performance. I had never heard applause quite like it, and the rest of the concert proved that it remains well earned to this day.

With the help of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Aleksandra Vrebalov's Bubbles cast an otherworldly veil over the concert, gently laying over the audience a series of haunting choral glissandos and sonorous vibes. Aheym, by Bryce Dessner of Brooklyn indie-rock group The National, was a rhythmic and emotionally satisfying piece for electric guitar and string quartet, and despite some acoustic difficulties, it was a definite standout on the program.