MIT Music and Theater Arts News

The Boston Musical Intelligencer
May 13, 2013

BCMS Delivers Interesting and Offbeat
by Susan Miron

“The Boston Chamber Music Society has been in business for three decades because they are doing a huge amount right. Interesting, offbeat pieces keep turning up on their programs, and the core group of artists and guests remain very high-caliber.”

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The Boston Globe
May 14, 2013

Unity and rarity mark chamber concert
by Matthew Guerrieri

CAMBRIDGE — Chamber music is often analogized to a counterpoint of views, but Sunday’s Boston Chamber Music Society concert at Sanders Theatre presented a united front, so much so that when, near the beginning of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Op. 57 Piano Quintet, cellist (and BCMS founder) Ronald Thomas broke a string, one half expected the other players to follow suit. In approach and interpretation, the conversation was that of a like-minded gathering.

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Strings
May 9, 2013

Live from Montreal !
by Laurence Vittes

On May 9, as Montreal’s professional hockey Canadiens saw its season end in a one-sided defeat to rivals from Ottawa, two resplendent, overlapping musical events also took place in town: the 18th Montreal Chamber Music Festival and the 2013 edition of the Montreal International Violin Competition.

Before a nearly full house in St. George’s Anglican Church in downtown Montreal, the Chamber Music Festival kicked off its season with a concert that was as many layered as the music.

Making their first festival appearance, the Boston Chamber Music Society (BCMS) played Menotti’s Suite for Two Cello and Piano, Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet and Schubert’s Quintet D. 956.

The concert reflected the close bond between musicians in Montreal and Boston, especially poignant after the recent Boston bombings, and the enduring friendship between BCMS artistic director and violist Marcus Thompson and the festival’s founder and artistic director Denis Brott (they had been students together at Aspen 50 years ago).

Also, it was announced that the festival’s three weeks of concerts will be broadcast to U.S. audiences through American Public Media by Boston’s WGBH, and that the program will travel to Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre for BCMS’s season finale.

Menotti’s engaging, 15-minute Suite, highlighted by a gorgeous “Arioso,” was something special for Brott. It was written in 1973 for performance at the Spoleto Festival in Italy by Gregor Piatigorsky and his young Canadian student and assistant, Denis Brott.

On the music’s 40th anniversary, Brott took over the first chair and was joined by BCMS cellist Ron Thomas and pianist Mihae Lee.

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The Boston Globe
May 13, 2013

A belated Boston premiere for ‘Gatsby’
by Jeremy Eichler

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The Boston Musical Intelligencer
May 13, 2013

Pursuing Firzgerald by Brian Schuth

“In the opera, the emotional extremity is embodied in the orchestral writing, which is kaleidoscopic, almost wild, expressionistic, with romantic swooning, dissonant climaxes, shot through with masterful ventriloquisms of 1920s jazz songs. The songs emerge from radios or from the band at Gatsby’s parties, and Harbison does such an excellent job imitating the period that you’d be forgiven for thinking them quotations.  FULL REVIEW

This interview appeared in the poetry publication, PN Review
Volume 39 Number 5, May – June 2013

Words and Music: A Conversation with Elena Ruehr by Reena Sastri
A graduate of the Julliard School and the University of Michigan, and a faculty member at MIT, Boston-based composer Elena Ruehr has created works for chamber ensemble, orchestra, chorus, wind ensemble, opera, dance and silent film. Rhythmically intricate and melodically graceful, her music has seductive surfaces which belie its complexity. I met with Elena Ruehr in January 2012 to discuss her recent cantata, Averno, based on Louise Glück’s 2006 volume of that name, and to learn more about setting poetry. The conversation took final shape in a subsequent exchange of emails, but grew out of a warm and animated exchange in the composer’s living room last winter.

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MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble and Vocal Jazz Ensemble recorded Chick Corea’s From Forever, Suite for Big Band, Harbison’s In Praise of MIT and Rhumba for Rafael Reif at the WGBH Fraser Studio with John Harbison, Frederick Harris, Keala Kaumeheiwa and Mark Harvey on 5/9/13.

MIT honors late band leader
Herb Pomeroy at moving
memorial concert

by Susan Saccoccia

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MITMIT honors late band leader Herb Pomeroy at moving memorial concert – See more at: http://www.baystatebanner.com/mit-bandleader-memorial-2013-05-02#sthash.OlQhPQWh.i8NnBrru.dpuf