Wolfgang Mozart’s Keyboard Challenge

Last Friday, the Amherst Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Mark Swanson, presented a full-length program to welcome Amherst parents for Family Weekend. The program, entitled “From the New World,” opened with Richard Wagner’s prelude to his opera “Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg” (“The Mastersingers of Nuremberg”), followed by Wolfgang Mozart’s concerto for piano and orchestra No. 9 in E-flat major with Alissa Leiser as solo pianist. The second half of the concert featured Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony

Don Giovanni and the Uncut Epilogue

The Metropolitan Opera’s new production of “Don Giovanni,” Mozart’s second collaboration with librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, was broadcast on Sat., Oct. 29 at the Cinemark in Hampshire Mall through the opera house’s Grammy-Award winning MetOpera Live in HD series. Under the baton of Fabio Luisi, both the singers and orchestral instrumentalists were competent at presenting a high-quality performance of Mozart’s ingenious opera. The musical aspect of the performance was more routine than particularl

Encountering Elitism: Do You Deserve This Music?

Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” one of the three celebrated Da Ponte operas, is currently featured at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City; if you’re interested, the Cinemark at Hampshire Mall is having a live screening of the matinée performance on Oct. 29, starting at 1 p.m. How would you dress yourself for such an opera, which is one of the most intense musical experiences you can ever have? Or for a full-length concert with the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Symphony Hall? The dress code migh

Out of the Renaissance Chaos

The Renaissance music of the 16th century is easily associated with sexual dramas. Susan McClary, the most eminent scholar of feminist musicology, wrote a whole book, “Modal Subjectivities,” to describe the various sexual scenes she found in late Renaissance music during the final decades of the 16th century. To understand such drama, it is necessary to trace the footprints of such music, which was born out of a confusing and chaotic time. The 16th century started as a Golden Age of musical cr

The Duke's Notebook: The "Barbaric" Music

Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. — Theodor Adorno Steve Reich, the American composer celebrated for minimalist compositions like “Piano Phase” (1967), “Clapping Music” (1972) and “Different Trains” (1988), just released a piece entitled WTC 9/11 for string quartet and prerecorded tape. Commissioned by his long-term collaborator the Kronos Quartet, it premiered at Duke Univ. this March as a musical tribute to the 10-Year memorial of the Sept. 11 attacks. The album reminds me of Arnol

The Duke's Notebook: Denk's Homage to Homes

“Is there a market for something like that?” asked an audience member of Carnegie Hall soloist Jeremy Denk, after having heard him play several piano études of the Hungarian-American composer György Ligeti (1923-2006) at a Seattle Chamber Music Festival concert this summer. Whether or not there is a market for Ligeti’s chaotic and complicated piano études is quite complicated. On one hand, Denk’s concert featuring Ligeti and Beethoven did manage to fill most of the seats in Buckley Recital Hall