David Patrick Stearns is a classical music critic and columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Email David Patrick at dstearns@phillynews.com
Sometimes, the Philadelphia Orchestra needs an outsider to remind it of who it is and what it was.
Gianandrea Noseda - a guest conductor so popular with the orchestra that he was reengaged for a two-week stint this season starting Thursday (with other return visits in the works) - happens to be the foremost Rachmaninoff specialist of his generation.
Whenever an excellent new flutist arrives in the classical concert world, you wish him or her a cushy position in a major symphony orchestra with time for a part-time solo career.
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Joan La Barbara's Ne(x)tworks navigates Cage's 'Song Books' at Christ Church
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The "Cage: Beyond Silence" festival - under way at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and other venues throughout the city since late October - has moved into its second phase of concerts, concentrating on John Cage's 1970, 90-piece Song Books collection. That collection has to do much less with the typical medium of song than with the many open-ended ways Cage released the music he felt was hidden everywhere.
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Stéphane Denève leads Phila. Orchestra, from Debussy to Gershwin
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Had most guest conductors foreseen this Thanksgiving would arrive in the wake of a hurricane, a contentious election, and the orchestra's bankruptcy, the Philadelphia Orchestra's annual holiday weekend concerts would have been more solemn, maybe with Richard Strauss' Death and Transfiguration.
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'War Horse' at the Academy of Music packs powerful antiwar message
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'They're not human beings! They're beasts!" So proclaims a German officer in the thick of battle in War Horse, the Tony Award-culling spectacle that spends this week and next at the Academy of Music. Though the beasts in question are played by larger-than-life-size puppets, much of the audience at
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Bring on the hard stuff
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NEW YORK - The sitting room is meticulously appointed, with the last two issues of the New York Review of Books neatly folded on the end table. In the kitchen, not a stray crumb is to be seen.
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A little heard post-World War II German rumba
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CAMDEN - Post-World War II Germany no doubt needed a good rumba, but who would have thought the furrow-browed modernist composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1918-1970) would be the one to provide it?
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Novel approach to 'The Magic Flute' raises own challenges
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For all of Mozart's distilled, sublime music, The Magic Flute usually feels like a work in progress due to its haphazard dramaturgy, obscure Masonic symbolism, and strangely paced second act.
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Review: 'Music Man' at Walnut Street Theatre
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The Music Man, the classic Broadway musical that opened Wednesday at the Walnut Street Theatre (and runs through Jan. 6), is a shameless, brassy happiness machine and earns that status honestly.
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Revisionist take on composers
- Iconoclastic Pierre- Laurent Aimard in a stimulating program at Kimmel Center.Pierre-Laurent Aimard is one of the more fascinating pianists of international stature because he meets the conservative world of dead composers halfway, but with an iconoclastic streak that promises a wild card - or three.
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Marathon performance of Bartok's string quartets
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Certain music never becomes easy. In fact, the formidability of Bela Bartok's six string quartets increases over time, especially when heard in the marathon concert by the Borromeo String Quartet Sunday at the Curtis Institute.
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A simulcast of 'The Tempest' at area theaters
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Opinions can be confoundingly divided between those who hear Metropolitan Opera performances at Lincoln Center and audiences at the high-def movie-theater simulcasts. Obviously, cameras rightly favor the singers over the sometimes questionable productions around them. But in the case of The Tempest, which will be beamed to six area movie theaters Saturday, the division may well be a question of urban tastes vs. others'. Or how many fools you're willing to suffer.
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