David Patrick Stearns is a classical music critic and columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Email David Patrick at dstearns@phillynews.com
The best day of his compositional life seemed just out of reach: On Sunday, Princeton-based composer Steve Mackey won a Grammy Award for his disc Lonely Motel, but it was for best small-ensemble performance; the classical-composition trophy, for which Lon
The music world is crawling with hot young violists (Maxim Rysanov, Lawrence Power, and David Aaron Carpenter) but they all have a ways to go before they're as interesting as Kim Kashkashian. At age 59, she is playing in peak form, and more than most, exp
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Nurturing a Prokofiev foundling
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PRINCETON - Recovering lost, minor works by major composers can seem a bit pathetic: If the music wasn't worth hanging on to in the first place, how great can the rewards be?
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Pianist Kuerti taps Beethoven the strange
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Somebody needed to program the orphans in Beethoven's output, and pianist Anton Kuerti was the one to do it at his Philadelphia Chamber Music Society recital Wednesday at the Kimmel Center.
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Grammys? Phooey! He'll take Philly
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PRINCETON - Though his rock-star charisma and Grammy nominations suggest that composer Steve Mackey should be packing his bags for the West Coast, this Princeton University professor is keeping it local.
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Opera Company on new path with collaboration plan
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Opera Company of Philadelphia is announcing more than new programming this week: In addition to a 2012-2013 season that includes old favorites such as Puccini's La Bohème and the local premiere of Thomas Adès' Powder Her Face, the opera company is taking note of sweeping internal developments that will affect what happens onstage.
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Players and singers join forces in Camden
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Even if Symphony in C's Saturday performance of the Mozart Requiem wasn't everything one could dream of, it was a model in partnerships that makes fantasy possible. Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia and a quartet of vocal soloists from the Academy of Vocal Arts joined the orchestra under its music director, Rossen Milanov, assuring professionalism that won't bust the budget. So what wasn't there to love?
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In Chestnut Hill, Tempesta di Mare plays Jommelli, Caldara - and Vivaldi
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For years, Tempesta di Mare has liberated its programs from the masterpiece mentality that often comes with higher-budget organizations. At Sunday's concert at Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, hardly a brand-name composer (excepting Antonio Vivaldi)
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Dolce Suono misses the madness of 'Pierrot Lunaire'
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Mood-stabilizing medication is a great thing for everyday life. But in art? Pierrot Lunaire - Arnold Schoenberg's revolutionary piece exploring new vistas of madness in music - seems to have had an all-too-tempering prescription when played by the enterprising Dolce Suono Ensemble in its "Mahler 100/Schoenberg 60" concert Friday at Haverford College.
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Two favorites seemed dated
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This summer's Philadelphia Orchestra celebration of Leopold Stokowski unofficially started early with the guest-conducting debut of the San Francisco Opera's Nicola Luisotti.
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A soprano who inhabits the music
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Technology utterly failed Philadelphia concertgoers on Sunday. For all the advances in communication, we still can be in only one place at a time - and that's just not fair when the same Sunday slot has recitals by violinist Tasmin Little (German Society), pianist Peter Serkin (Curtis Institute), and the early-music singer Yulia Van Doren (Trinity Center).
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Singing fine, staging not in Metropolitan Opera's "Götterdämmerung"
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NEW YORK - This is how the Metropolitan Opera's new Ring cycle production ended - not with a scenic blowout characterizing the end of the world, but with some red lights and white statues of the god-like characters, their heads exploding with a wan pop.
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