Making his Spivey Hall debut Sunday afternoon, Jakub Józef Orliński seemed to inhabit two different mindsets. The star Polish countertenor, with Polish pianist Michał Biel, offered a program of Baroque treasures contrasted by Romantic art songs from Poland, and the differences were stark — until the encores resolved any lingering doubts. In many ways, you…
Thursday felt like a special night in Symphony Hall. The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra has programmed the music of Florence Price before, as recently as last year, but for the first time the orchestra was celebrating the arrival of an important new voice. Born in Arkansas, Price escaped the Jim Crow South as part of the…
Can you name a talented early-music singer who is equally good at conducting, and who performs, on the same program, as both singer and conductor with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra? Of course you’d guess the ASO’s music director-designate, Nathalie Stutzmann, right? Wrong! Turns out there are other multi-talents, where merely singing Baroque opera and conducting…
Anyone curious about what a conductor does on the podium could find answers by comparing the last two Atlanta Symphony Orchestra programs. Conducting, we learn, is as much about persuasive musicality as group psychology. It’s also about negotiating an interpretation with a stage full of skilled musicians who, oftentimes, know the music better than the…
It’s a relief that Saturday’s concert was performed at all. Over the past month, with surging Covid cases and overflowing hospitals, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra canceled some concerts and made others online-only. For the almost-full Symphony Hall audience, we counted our blessings where we could, since an insert in the ASO program booklet announced that…
Kinnara, a four-voice Atlanta chamber choir of exacting standards and progressive artistic values, gave an in-person performance Saturday — their first since Covid’s arrival — at Glenn Memorial Church on the Emory University campus. It was thoughtfully programmed to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. With a masked and vaccine-checked audience, the choir returned…
We’re desperate to return to normal, to attend our favorite shows, despite the endless plague of deadly new Covid variants. Whistling past the graveyard, so to speak, we attend holiday concerts like the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s annual excerpt from Handel’s Messiah. This year they paired it with Bach’s cantata Jauchzet, frohlocket (“Celebrate, Rejoice”), part of…
Donald Runnicles set the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra on fire this past weekend. First, he conducted music of late-Romantic masters (Thursday and Saturday). Then, on Sunday afternoon in Symphony Hall, he led a deluxe concert performance of Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, which repeats Wednesday evening. Taken as a pair, these weekend concerts — especially Thursday’s…
Over the past couple of decades, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra has been lucky with two contrasting artistic leaders: music director Robert Spano and principal guest conductor Sir Donald Runnicles. They’ve each left a legacy of sensationally memorable concerts. Spano’s programs were often the more interesting — or perhaps more artfully planned — juxtaposing music in…
There’s a meme going around the internet and perhaps you’ve seen it: This holiday season, it’s important to remind people of the true meaning of Christmas: ghosts terrorizing rich people in the middle of the night until they agree to pay their employees more. It’s time again for the Alliance Theatre’s A Christmas Carol, Charles…
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