by Daniel Hathaway
MUSICIANS AT HOME:
Popular ChamberFest Cleveland violinist Alexi Kenney is busy practicing and composing while staying home. Here’s a recent video, “My interpretation of one of my favorite songs, Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’ from her album of the same name. Original composition written March 29, 2020 during the coronavirus outbreak in NYC and recorded in my apartment.” Watch here.
Violinist Alan Choo, harpsichordist QinYing Tan, and members of Red Dot Baroque, the ensemble that Choo — a doctoral candidate at CWRU — founded in his native Singapore, have virtually recorded a version of Henry Purcell’s Strike the Viol that follows in the tradition of Ross Duffin’s musical parodies and injects a bit of jeering humor into our current emergency. Watch here.
And fortepianist Sylvia Berry — recently featured with Les Délices — has been recording videos for the virtual services her church in Massachusetts is holding. “I don’t know who might need to hear this, but it’s a piece that fits how I feel: Mozart’s Adagio for Glass Harmonica, written in 1791, his final year. This is my 5-octave Viennese fortepiano by Chris Maene (1995) after Anton Walter (1795).” Watch here.
TODAY’S STREAMS:
See the Concert Listings for today’s streams, including Orli Shaham’s new Midweek Mozart series, a new batch of archive videos from the San Francisco Symphony, a chain organ recital from Hartford’s Trinity College Chapel curated by Christopher Houlihan, a CIM Orchestra virtual concert, and The Met Opera’s Nixon in China.
INTERESTING READ:
New Washington Post music critic Michael Andor Brodeur writes today about the sense of permanence classical music can provide in a time of uncertainty:
Classical music properly done offers listeners a sample of the impossible: a seamless overlap of past and present, a fleeting encounter between the ideal and the real. And while no artifact is more ephemeral than a piece of music, the experience of music — when we allow its treatment of time to temporarily override time’s treatment of us — can give us surer footing in our least stable moments.
Read the article here.