Classical music concerts haven’t always been in big, imposing halls with sound baffles, ushers and clearly marked exits. Like music of every kind down to the present day, much of it was written for intimate settings, such as a modest home or a small coffeehouse. Tomorrow night, the Miami Beach hotel The Betsy is holding [...]
Premieres of fresh classical music often get heralded in the bigger cities of this country and elsewhere, but even though South Florida might not have that kind of profile, it still gets a reasonable share every season of new pieces. This afternoon in Coconut Grove, a string quartet will give two performances of a work [...]
During the next two days, young people from 39 states will wrap up their week of activities in YoungArts Week, sponsored by the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts. Founded 31 years ago by Ted Arison, founder of the Carnival Cruise Lines empire, and his wife, Lin, the foundation finds talented young artists ages [...]
This Sunday at the Aventura Arts and Cultural Center, the Italian pianist Francesco Libetta presents a program of core Romantic repertoire as part of the Miami International Piano Festival. Libetta’s made a number of well-received programs hereabouts, and the program he’s planning for Sunday contains solid-gold pieces, such as a number of Chopin etudes (all [...]
In her visits to the schools, community centers and hospitals of New York City, pianist Marina Radiushina became a believer. A believer, that is, in the power of music to reach people, especially those who don’t encounter it very often. “I really, really saw what a difference music can make,” she said. “And I thought that [...]
It’s hard to get 700 people into a room for most things, if it’s not a sporting event or a major rock concert. So when that many people showed up in 2009 for a cantorial concert celebrating Alan Mason’s 18 years of service at Temple Israel of Greater Miami, he and his fellow musicians knew [...]
The news keeps getting better and better for Seraphic Fire. On Wednesday, the Miami concert choir born nine years ago at the Church of the Epiphany in South Miami was informed that it had been nominated for two Grammy awards. Its newest recording, the “London” version of the Brahms “German Requiem,” is nominated in the [...]
Of the more than 1,000 pieces that Franz Schubert composed before his early death at the age of 31, around 600 of them are songs. He was the supreme master of the German Lied in the first decades of the 19th century, and while there are many individual treasures in his vast catalog, he’s particularly [...]
One of the more exciting musicological discoveries of 2010 comes to life this weekend when a Miami-based Baroque flutist performs a long-lost concerto by Antonio Vivaldi. The concerto, called “Il Gran Mogol,” apparently was written in the late 1720s as part of a collection of four flute concerti honoring various potentates; this one would have [...]
It’s a weekend for the slightly unusual, beginning with Florida Grand Opera’s first-ever mounting of a zarzuela, and a quirky recital program Sunday that features a beautiful instrument that hardly anyone plays. Zarzuela is Spanish operetta, meaning that it features spoken dialogue between musical numbers, much like the American musical (which itself descends from Viennese [...]
