Donald Hunt reviews the new resident ensemble for Bowerbird, Arcana New Music Ensemble. He details the group’s incredible stylistic range while introducing us to a few of its members, and speaks to the acoustic richness of University Lutheran Church.
Read MoreDonald reviews an eclectic evening of music composed for video games, hardly a traditional outlet for classical music–and finds a surprising amount of fun to be had.
Read MoreDonald reviews a collaboration between the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in which paintings from the collection are paired with musical compositions they have inspired. While the idea of pairing music has the potential to provoke creative dialogue, the overall result fell short of those ambitions, he says.
Read MoreDonald Hunt thinks about what defines American music in his review of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s recent performance of music by Leonard Bernstein, Pat Metheny and Antonin Dvorák.
Read MoreArs Nova Workshop can be relied on to bring new music to Philadelphia audiences. Steve Lehman’s Sélébéyone, presented on March 24 at the Painted Bride Art Center, was no exception. A composer and alto-saxophonist, Lehman has received a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2014 Doris Duke Artist Award, and has worked with major national and international artists like Vijay Iyer, Jason Moran, and Meshell Ndegeocello. For this performance, Lehman brought together an innovative combination of jazz, hip-hop, rap, and electronica whose disparate parts worked together surprisingly well.
Read MoreAny fantasy you can think of has multiple dimensions to it; this is especially true in Vijay Iyer’s Bridgetower Phantasy, which premiered in Philadelphia performed by violinist Jennifer Koh and pianist Shai Wosner as part of the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society’s recital season. The March 21 concert at the Kimmel Center’s Perelman Theater featuring the new Iyer work was bookended by two Beethoven violin sonatas, including the Kreutzer sonata. Iyer’s piece is titled after the African violinist to whom Beethoven dedicated his Kreutzer sonata, suggesting that Iyer sees this work as a response and a companion piece to Beethoven’s sonata. These historical and musical resonances made for a compelling program that brought together old and new.
Read MoreDonald Hunt revisits an artist he loves, José James, whose performance at the intimate club, the Foundry, surprised with the artist doing an impassioned and political rap turn in addition to his beloved R+B songs from the post-election-inspired album, ‘Love in a Time of Madness.’
Read MoreIn contrast to the typical fear associated with this day, the Daedalus Quartet embrace it wholeheartedly, using the day itself as inspiration for their sold-out concert program of mostly new works in the Penn Museum’s Chinese Rotunda (co-presented by the Penn Music Department and Bowerbird).
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