Some of the concerts blur into a gluey mass, but after nearly 50 years of writing music reviews, some are unforgettable.
I was reviewing rock into the late Seventies, and some of those endure as benchmarks: Dylan solo and acoustic in 1964, The Who doing a full “Tommy” at the Boston Tea Party, Bowie as Ziggy Stardust at the Music Hall in Boston, Elvis Costello at the Cape Cod Coliseum. But it’s the chamber, orchestral and opera performances that inhabit me most:
• Mariella Devia in her role as Gilda in “Rigoletto” at the Met walked to the footlights and mesmerized the huge hall with an achingly gorgeous pianissimo.
• In 1995, a 15-year-old violinist named Hilary Hahn performed Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1 at Summer Music in Waterford. The child was audacious in her command of the score and the stage, and I had the temerity to write that she was “well on her way to becoming the best violinist this country has ever produced.” Sometimes a critic is right.
• Pianist Ignat Solzhenitsyn wove a dreamworld of Scriabin, layering the mystical overtones in the shimmering acoustics of Musical Masterwork’s unique musical sanctuary in Old Lyme.
• Andre Previn and Dresden Staatskapelle made time stand still, defying Einstein with the final pages of Strauss’s “Death and Transfiguration” at the Bushnell in Hartford – 25 years after I saw Jimi Hendrix in that cavernous hall.
• The Philip Glass Ensemble gave the single most unforgettable performance I’ve ever seen, let alone reviewed, when they staged his opera “La Belle et la Bête” with four singers lip-syncing to the classic Cocteau film at the Garde Arts Center in New London. Both incomprehensibly technical and meltingly lovely, it was a conception worthy of Bach.
• Violinist Tessa Lark debuted at in 2013 at Musical Masterworks by starting at the top: Bach’s chaconne from the D Minor Partita, one of the singular works of the classical repertoire. She turned the 13-minute solo violin work in a passion play, with pain and redemption and resignation played out measure by measure with gut-wrenching insight.
• Christopher Hogwood and the Handel & Haydn Society performed that best-known oratorio, Handel’s “The Messiah,” as if brand new, a minimalist vocal force of just 16 voices propelling its drama always forward at the Palmer Auditorium at Connecticut College.
• After attending many performances at the Metropolitan Opera, the least likely candidate turned out to be the best. “The Enchanted Island” is a pastiche opera, using scores from Handel, Vivaldi and Purcell with a new fantasy libretto and splashy Met stagecraft. As Placido Domingo in King Neptune regalia led the ensemble in the finale, the audience stood and cheered through the last dozen measures.
• Last but not least, after reviewing many terrific performances of the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Toshi Shimada (a group that punches well above its weight), Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony in 2015 stands out. All Prokofiev’s sarcasm and energy lit up the hall, a sonic treat I still stream.
There were so many concerts in so many venues, seeing greats like Anne Sofie von Otter or Yo Yo Ma, but this handful really hit me. They left a mark.
Whenever we look through a family album of old photographs, most of us ask "Who is this?" not "Who was this?" Photographs are always present tense, and so are all the elements of life the enrich us. This blog considers music, film, books and other communications that call out to me always in the present tense.
