Showing category "Hearing Music" (Show all posts)

Studio Email from August 2

Posted by Patricia Callaway on Monday, August 17, 2020, In : Hearing Music 

Hello Everyone,

 

I’ve decided to go with a more positive subject line since nobody knows when we’ll all feel like in-person lessons again.  Eventually, I’m sure.  In the meantime, let’s consider Il Trovatore, or The Troubador, a Verdi opera that I will nearly always watch whenever there’s a chance – like this past Thursday when the Met streamed it.  Many people love to point out it’s flaws, particularly that the libretto is so twisty and needlessly complex that hardly anyone ...


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Studio Email from July 5

Posted by Patricia Callaway on Monday, August 17, 2020, In : Hearing Music 

Hi everyone,

Rejoice and be exceeding glad!  I’m using my new computer, which the beloved spouse has caused to behave itself.  So that’s the happy part.  Less happy is that I’ve decided to wait a while on opening the Studio, and I’m sure everyone understands why.  Besides all the safety reasons, Frank and his parents are coming to stay for a week or so while their furniture travels to Durham where Mike will be teaching during his sabbatical.  It’s a long and circumstantial story wi...


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Charlie Parker's Yardbird at the Atlanta Opera

Posted by Patricia Callaway on Thursday, October 11, 2018, In : Hearing Music 
The AO's Discovery Series is one of the highlights of what they do.  I've seen some wonderful music theater experiences in this series, and the most recent is Charlie Parker's Yardbird.  I wish I'd had time to read the program notes before the show, because the biographical information would have helped me to follow the story better.  It's a series of events from Parker's life in a libretto by Bridgette A. Wimberly, who evidently did a considerable amount of research.  The story is not the st...
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Continuing Education

Posted by Patricia Callaway on Monday, July 21, 2014, In : Hearing Music 

Sometimes things just fall into place.  I’ve mentioned before that I have been slowly working my way through Richard Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music over the past few years.  I’m sort of in Volume 5, Music in the Late Twentieth Century.  “Sort of” because back when I was trying to read and keep up with my music history classes, I had to skip bits of volumes two and three that I will get to eventually.

So here I am reading about Elvis and the Beatles as assessed by Taru...


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Taruskin, the Cold War, and Latin America

Posted by Patricia Callaway on Tuesday, May 6, 2014, In : Hearing Music 

Some of you know that I’ve been working on the five volumes of Richard Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music for some years now.  I’ve made it to Volume 5, Music in the Late 20th Century, and, as usual, Dr. Taruskin has grabbed my attention with thought-provoking ideas that may or may not match up with what other musicologists think, but that certainly make a lot of sense to me.  He started out with the premise that he could only write about the history of the literate genres of ...


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Attention Choir Directors: Good New Anthems

Posted by Patricia Callaway on Sunday, February 9, 2014, In : Hearing Music 

Ray and I went to hear the Georgia Young Composers Festival concert by the DeKalb Choral Guild last night.  There were six finalists this year, and six good new choral works.  My favorite was Silent Night? by Uzbekistan-born Liliya Ugay, who is working on a piano performance degree at Columbus State.  She won the undergraduate prize.  All of the works had very nice choral parts, but hers also had an accompaniment that would require a pianist with skills.  It was both beautiful and interesti...


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Tosca and Urinetown in the Same Week

Posted by Patricia Callaway on Sunday, October 20, 2013, In : Hearing Music 
    It really sounds like from the sublime to the ridiculous, doesn’t it? Actually it was two interesting and engaging works each beautifully performed. The Atlanta Opera has really taken a step forward with their recent Tosca. It was beautifully directed by their new general manager Tomer Zvulun, who had directed some of their most visually interesting past shows, and who did not feel called upon to make a 10-minute curtain speech beforehand.

   
The voices were wonderful. Soprano Kara Shay...
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Don Giovanni vs. The Flowering Tree

Posted by Patricia Callaway on Tuesday, June 19, 2012, In : Hearing Music 
I’ve seen two operas in the past few weeks, and both were beautifully performed, Mozart’s Don Giovanni by the Atlanta Opera and John Adam’s The Flowering Tree by the Atlanta Symphony. One was an utterly satisfying experience, and the other quite a bit less so. Yeah, well, it was Mozart wasn’t it? Well, yes, it was, but John Adams is a very fine composer who has written some operatic works that look as if they will stay in the repertoire – a pretty major feat without having to...
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Atlanta Lyric's Millie

Posted by Patricia Callaway on Saturday, October 8, 2011, In : Hearing Music 

Last week my husband and I trekked to Marietta to see Thoroughly Modern Millie at the Strand Theater where the Atlanta Lyric was producing the show.  I have a lot of fondness for the Lyric, having been around at the founding of the Southeastern Savoyards, and I thought that in most areas they did a fine job with Millie

Everyone in the show was in great form to do justice to a really fun show.  I was so happy to see Andy Dahn, whom I remember as a Shorter student at the NATS State Student Au...


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Todd Skrabanek's Incredible Concert

Posted by Patricia Callaway on Monday, September 12, 2011, In : Hearing Music 
Saturday night we headed over to Glenn Memorial on the Emory campus to hear one of Atlanta's best pianists.  Todd Skrabanek does not do recitals very often because he's so busy accompanying the ASO Chorus, Glenn Memorial choirs, and lucky students from Agnes Scott and Reinhardt.  Todd is never one to let five notes do when fifty may be played, and all four of the works on his concert were stunningly brilliant.

My favorite was the Bach Partita No. 4 in D, BWV 828.  Not only were all the notes t...
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Alcina at Brevard

Posted by Patricia Callaway on Monday, August 1, 2011, In : Hearing Music 
It's been probably 25 years since the last time I visited Brevard.  Inge was still teaching there in the summers, and I was young and foolish enough to slide down Sliding Rock.  I'm not sure that I ever saw an opera there, and when I realized that they were doing Alcina, getting myself there was more about seeing a Handel opera that I've never seen than really having high expectations.  Well, no matter how high my expectations might have been, they would have been justified by the production ...
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Last Night at the Symphony

Posted by Patricia Callaway on Sunday, June 5, 2011, In : Hearing Music 

Such an amazing thing happened at the Atlanta Symphony concert last night!  Actually several amazing things happened.  First of all the whole concert was music written within the last 75 years, the first half and part of the second half of the program was music written since 1987, and three of those pieces were written this year.  Two of them were two of the fanfares that the ASO has commissioned to celebrate Robert Spano’s 10th anniversary with the Orchestra.  One was Tenfold by Jennifer H...


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Atlanta's Shakespeare Tavern

Posted by Patricia Callaway on Sunday, December 19, 2010, In : Hearing Music 
This week my family made our annual Shakespeare Tavern visit for Dickens' A Christmas Carol.  We have been Tavern regulars for at least ten years, maybe a lot longer than that, and one of the reasons is the music.  It's not often that you get to hear well performed, acoustic music that is not church music and not performed in some stuffy recital setting.  The Tavern's small size and excellent acoustics along with the actors' skills make such a performance possible.

As a voice teacher I have to...
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