Music Reviews

You would have to be quite a sure-footed composer to believe you could improve on something as perfect as the harpsichord sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti.

Nothing clears the mind of overplayed Christmas season tunes – popularly known as earworms -- like an hour in the company of Keeril Makan’s music. His new CD, Afterglow, is as refreshing as a glass of cold Chablis.

Dame Evelyn Glennie works wonders with her mallets, hammers and her bare hands in a new CD of John Corigliano’s percussion concerto – a piece that he initially hesitated to undertake for fear that it couldn’t be done. At least not to his exacting standards.

Alexander Tcherepnin’s piano music, just completed on last of four CDs, reflects his lifelong span of variegated composition, including his earliest creations at 15 years of age while on the run with his family from Russian revolutionaries. 

French composer Charles-Valentin Alkan, a member of the Liszt-Chopin circle and one of the most respected piano virtuosos of his day, is back with us after decades of neglect.  The occasion for his return is the 200^th anniversary of his birth, and two striking CDs o

The intensity of the relationship between Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann has intrigued music historians for 150 years and now conductor/pianist John Axelrod has tackled the liaison with a new double CD set (Brahms Beloved, Telarc) linking them in words and music.

Nothing excites music lovers more than the discovery of a previously unknown composition by a dead master.  Such stories are even better if the score has been unearthed from detritus in some isolated farmhouse almost ready for the torch.

“Light and Shadow” at New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall Saturday night was sponsored by the Foundation for Chinese Performing Arts, a worthy non-profit organization devoted mainly to boosting young Chinese musicians and artists.

The Korean-born, American-trained pianist Soyeon Kate Lee is developing rapidly as a seasoned performer with personal charm and musical intelligence, both of which were on display Sunday in a challenging program at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Traditional classical music finally wore out its welcome with me a few years ago by endless repetition of the Top Twenty pieces on FM radio.

Renowned Japanese percussionist Kuniko Kato makes stunning music from the simplest of instruments, stretching their sonorities to heights never previously heard on record.

The Van Cliburn International Piano Competition ended with the results many observers had predicted, the gold medal going to a self-assured Vadym Kholodenko, 26, of Ukraine.

I recently became a “chance music” composer by accident – the best way. John Cage would have approved.

The late American composer Morton Feldman, an influential underground figure who was spurned by mainstream musicians in his lifetime, is enjoying a welcome, if belated, renaissance in the US and Europe.

Except for the lucky few who have the gift, students struggling to coax music out of a piano are in for a world of pain.

A young man from provincial Italy brought style back to the recent Van Cliburn Piano Competition with unbridled displays of joy at the keyboard and a mature artist’s mastery of the music.

Alessandro Deljavan, the promising young Italian pianist who emerged as a major contender at the recent Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, has decided to pull out of the Cleveland International Piano Competition just a month before it opens July 3O.

Young pianists who decide to go into major international competitions will need much more than musicianship from now on.

The young Italian pianist Mauro Bertoli, now based in Ottawa, Canada, displays considerable hubris in leading off his recent solo CD with three well-known Scarlatti sonatas. If he felt he had something to say that Horowitz and Pogorelich hadn’t already said, he was right.

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is one of the most arresting of the Romantic period creations but this has not prevented commentators from writing “roaring cataracts of nonsense” about it.  Those choice words from the late English critic and musicologist Donald Tovey came to mind as