Reviewing Katherine Chi.
Boston Globe, April 29, 2009.

Reviewing the Orion String Quartet and David Krakauer.
Boston Globe, April 20, 2009.

This one really had to get trimmed for space. So here’s the deal: click on the link to boost the Globe‘s traffic—they’re nice enough to keep employing me, after all—then come back and compare with this slightly more garrulous version:

Nationalism once removed was on the docket for the Orion String Quartet for their Celebrity Series concert on Sunday: composers annexing exogenous traditions to their own musical dominions. Joined by the superb, pan-stylistic clarinetist David Krakauer, the group similarly captured each disparate piece within their own dramatic orbit.

The quartet opened with Hugo Wolf’s brisk, sunny “Italian Serenade.” The players—brothers Todd and Daniel Phillips on violin, violist Steven Tenenbom, and cellist Timothy Eddy—converged on the same dark, focused tone and firm-edged bowing. The resulting energetic reading seemed to overlay the music’s good time with a deliberate determination to have it.

Excess succeeds in David Del Tredici’s 2006 “Maygar Madness,” commissioned for Krakauer and the Orion Quartet by a consortium of presenters (including Celebrity Series). Del Tredici’s trademark neo-Romanticism nearly forgoes the prefix—four-fifths of the piece would fit the Brahmsian aesthetic of Boston a century ago—and the music’s titular Hungarian color has the authenticity of a Gypsy-themed Hollywood production number.

But that is the unashamed point of the work’s thronged expanse, in which any notion good enough for two bars is good enough for eight. As in much of Del Tredici’s music, the extra innings run longer than the original game; one’s pleasure shifts from formal apprehension to a compounding disport in the parade of ideas coming to the plate. The ensemble maintained conviction throughout: Krakauer’s valiant navigation of a frequently high-flying part, the quartet’s unflagging ardor. The composer was on dapper hand for a number of curtain calls.

Osvaldo Golijov’s 1994 “K’vakarat,” by contrast, generates power through concentration. Originally for cantor and strings, the transcription of Ashkenazic chant for clarinet lends the somber prayer a poignant, klezmer-infused vernacular overlay; the quartet’s full-throttle intensity, scintillation rising to eloquent fury, was equal to the music’s explosive emotions.

Beethoven closed the program: the second of the opus 59 “Razumovsky” quartets, the ruminative and voluble E-minor, complete with its own mischievously obsessive quotation of a Russian tune. The group adopted a vigorous precision (more vigorous than precise in the finale) that gave due heft to the music’s symphonic ambitions.

Stepping to the podium. Interviewing Shi-Yeon Sung.
Boston Globe, April 12, 2009.

Some cut-for-space quotes:

On charisma:

I don’t think charisma is always [imitates an angry tantrum] “AUAAAHH”; there is also soft charisma. It’s a different way of charisma. And that you can’t learn. The thing is, you have it, or you don’t have it. Also, if you just have this kind of thought in your mind—I want to put the humanity of the music, and the humanity of life in the music—if you have this kind of charismatic thought behind you, it comes out. Those things you can’t explain to the orchestra. If you have this, it comes out.

On still feeling like an outsider:

Actually, if I go to Germany, and I do Beethoven, I think I don’t always feel comfortable with this; because the German people are so proud of their hero, and some Asian girl comes there and conducts Beethoven? This kind of thing, maybe I’m not comfortable with this. [MG: Does it give you something to prove?] I don’t think so. I prepare just what I can, the best I can, and just go…. I don’t do overreaction, you know? (laughs) I think I’m [the type of] person, I accept every situation.

On competitions:

I remember, my first competition was a female competition in Germany [the Solingen Competition for women conductors], and I won first prize; and my professor was so proud of me, and he said, you have to go to the press office and announce your first prize. I just told him, no, no, someday I want to go to [an] international competition, with women and men at the same time! If we win there, then, I’ll go to the press office. I remember that. And then it came true!

Reviewing the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra.
Boston Globe, April 8, 2009.

Reviewing the Boston Chamber Music Society.
Boston Globe, April 1, 2009.

Update (4/1): Reader Laurence Glavin pointed out that the Beethoven Cello Sonata is opus 69, not 67. I guess those post-concert margaritas were stronger than I thought. (And it’s not like Mozart, where you can always cover your tracks by claiming to be working from a particularly obscure revision of the Köchel catalog.)

Update (4/3): Fixed, at least online.

Reviewing the Boston Symphony Chamber Players and André Previn.
Boston Globe, March 25, 2009.

Reviewing Lang Lang.
Boston Globe, March 4, 2009.

Reviewing the Stockhausen Intuitive-Musik marathon by the Callithumpian Consort et al.
Boston Globe, February 27, 2009.

Reviewing the Boston Philharmonic and Gabriela Montero.
Boston Globe, February 24, 2009.

Reviewing the Manhattan Sinfonietta.
Boston Globe, February 24, 2009.

As soon as I came up with the phrase “mutable sonic orreries” I immediately began tinkering with the idea of starting a steampunk/psychedelica band so that could be the title of our first album. Then I ran the phrase through the Mac’s built-in speech synthesizer a few times, and it sounded goofier every time. So I left it in. Sometimes I have a little too much fun at my job.