Scott MacClelland

Scott MacClelland has written on music and, in Monterey County, taught on the subject for more than three decades.  

Articles By This Author

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Review

Carmel Bach, Trotting Through Paradise

Scott MacClelland - July 20, 2009

The search for a new Carmel Bach Festival music director is already under way, even while Bruno Weil has one last Festival to lead in 2010. One local wag lately suggested in a letter to the Monterey County Herald that Weil might give serious thought to a mostly-Bach program next year.

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Review

Praises to God

Scott MacClelland - July 22, 2008
Bach's Mass in B Minor can be a work of grandeur, just as it can be a miscellany of movements gathered from various of his cantatas with the original words replaced by those of the Latin Mass. Either, and even more possibilities, can readily be justified, or at least rationalized.

Change of Oratorio

Scott MacClelland - December 4, 2007
For a change, a Handel oratorio other than Messiah sounded seasonally sweet at UC Santa Cruz — with an added performance in San Francisco — this past weekend.
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Review

Compulsively Being Werther

Scott MacClelland - November 20, 2007
Even though it revolves around a love triangle, Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther would not have appealed to Verdi because of its lack of a higher moral or sociopolitical conflict. But for Jules Massenet, making a stage work of such a personal, barely dramatic dilemma was just his musical meat.
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Review

From Rare to Well-Done

Scott MacClelland - October 2, 2007
An institutional rarity, the Ives String Quartet is its own nonprofit corporation, and produces its own "Home Series" Bay Area season of concerts. Currently, these include three programs played twice, at St. Mark's Church in Palo Alto and at Le Petit Trianon Theatre in San Jose.
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Review

Vocal Up-and-Comers

Scott MacClelland - September 11, 2007
Making her debut with Opera San José last Sunday afternoon, Khori Dastoor dominated the stage in the coloratura title role of Lucia di Lammermoor, blazing through her shrewdly conceived mad scene with theatrical abandon and scenery-chewing panache.

Light in the Darkness

Scott MacClelland - August 7, 2007
Choral directors who tackle Gesualdo’s Tenebrae Responses do so at their own peril.
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Review

In Praise of Sandor Salgo

Scott MacClelland - July 17, 2007
Sunday's matinee performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, a feature of the 70th anniversary season of the Carmel Bach Festival, memorialized Sandor Salgo.