Michelle Dulak Thomson
Michelle Dulak Thomson is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America, and The New York Times.
Articles by this Author
I suppose I’m getting to be a bore about the Takács Quartet, but all the same it’s a wonder to see them grow together. The February program is a delicious one, featuring as it does the Debussy Quartet, Britten’s Third, and Janáček’s Second.
The 20th anniversary of the formal dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was on Dec. 31, 2011. It was not an anniversary much marked in this country, except among Soviet expats, but it provides some background to the Pacifica Quartet’s most recent recording.
It is generally unwise to draw conclusions from the cover art that record labels attach to recordings. Alfred Brendel reputedly had a contractual agreement whereby his image had to be on the front of everything he recorded for Phillips. The reason that everything clarinetist Thea King recorded for Hyperion had to have cattle somewhere in the cover art hasn’t, so far as I know, ever been explained.
Violinist James Ehnes’ bio begins with a quote from the Toronto Globe & Mail hailing him as “the Jascha Heifetz of our day.” Now, this is silliness. There is no Jascha Heifetz of our day, in the sense of anyone whose sound is as unmistakable as his was, and the comparison does no one any favors. All the same, we have some extremely fine violinists nowadays, and Ehnes is one of them.
Anyone who’s followed this quirky (and preposterously skilled) ensemble for any time at all knows that it’s ill-inclined to sit still, and that when it does move, it’s nearly always in a startling direction. The quartet’s most recent project is called Fragments, and the idea is that half a dozen living composers are presented with unfinished works of earlier composers, to respond to as they will.
The vocal quartet Anonymous 4 spent most of its early career hovering around music of the 12th through 14th centuries, with more-recent forays into later music (shape-note singing and other American vernacular music, newly composed music). Here the quartet is back at the center of its old stomping-grounds, with selections from the Codex Las Huelgas.
You can’t let your guard down for a moment these days when it comes to string players; close your eyes briefly and another’s turned up on you. Charlie Siem’s recording of Wieniawski, Bruch, and Bull concertante works with the London Symphony Orchestra under Andrew Gourlay is the first I’ve heard of Siem, though it’s his third CD.
Should anyone not be tired of Farinelli’s repertoire after the Philharmonia Baroque set, here is Philippe Jaroussky, among the most recent of the countertenor superstars, singing Handel and Vivaldi arias with Jeannette Sorrell’s Cleveland-based ensemble Apollo’s Fire.
Ensemble Caprice: La Follia and the Gypsies, San Francisco Early Music Society
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Preview
October 17, 2011
Strange though it may seem, the “classical” music world didn’t just stumble on “popular” music in the late20th century. Everything from bawdy songs to fiddlers’ tunes to dance rhythms has been raw material for composers for pretty well as long as we’ve had written music at all.
There are precious few infallible guarantors of musical fun, but “a good Baroque orchestra and a pile of Rameau” is one of them.
This is a disc that presents, at first glance, a small puzzle. It’s presented as Volume I of a complete traversal of Alexander Borodin’s chamber music on the Praga label, but Volume II of the series already exists — has, in fact, been available for the past five years. What’s going on here?
Adrian Chandler and his orchestra La Serenissima have been poking around Vivaldi for years now, and doing it very well indeed.
t’s quite a history, Hans Gál’s. Born near Vienna in 1890; moved to Germany and became, for a time, a very well-known and successful composer; fled back to Vienna with the rise of Hitler (Gál was of Jewish descent), and then fled that city for Britain at the Anschluss, living and teaching there until his death in 1987. Meanwhile, his music swelled the ranks of the unperformed.
There are many ways to play 
Solo Bach, to be trite, is to string players as a flame is to a moth: irresistible, yet posing a considerable risk of getting burnt alive. No serious violinist or cellist goes without the Sonatas and Partitas or the Suites, respectively.
