Concert Review Site

Madonna clearly can’t think of much to do. She’s been divorced or split up with her men a few times. This is one of the biggest problems she has, perhaps. She has a hole in her that she’s determined to fill. She’s decided to go back to Malawi and adopt another child. There are several problems with this at the moment, however. Malawi requires that she be married in order to get a child. Also, the child’s grandparents don’t want to give the child up and the parents are long gone. Is this right? Hard to tell, but Madonna is working on it to see what she can solve and see if she can’t help anyone.

Operas aren’t necessarily concerts, but they are also very similar. This is one of those interesting operas, called Doctor Atomic, playing at the London Coliseum right now. It’s by the minimalist composer John Adams, who has written several operas about historical events. This is an interesting show because it takes a theme that comes up fairly frequently, the atomic bomb, and puts another spin on it. It’s done from the perspective of J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the fathers of the bomb. It’s kind of a sad thing, because he was one of the few people to really grasp the import of the bomb, and this is very clearly presented in the show. It is one of those shows that really makes you think about the world. And it’s got beautiful music, not really as minimalist as Adams’ earlier stuff. Check it out if you get the chance.

Recently, I chatted with someone who saw the Chicago Civic Orchestra earlier this week. The concert included an interesting mix of 20th century music, including Bartok, Schumann and another composer, with whom I was not familiar. According to this person, however, the orchestra acquitted their job quite well. The newer piece was one of these interesting pieces that combines interesting poetry with great orchestration. It was apparently a bit harder to understand, and the singer could have been somewhat clearer in enunciation. But the text could be found in the program, so this isn’t quite such a problem. The other pieces were well done. What was with the Symphony Center, though? The lights flickered and distracted my friend quite a bit.

Bernard Haitink conducted a great concert with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. The concert included Schumann’s piano concerto and a symphony by Bruckner. Bruckner’s symphonies are “like vast cathedrals” and the RCO did a great job with it. The reviewer seems to have been well-impressed by the concert, including a great soloist on the Schumann. Haitink has been known as one of the best conductors in Europe right now and he clearly has his crew well in hand. The soloist, a Mr. Perahia is an impressive pianist and he really laid it all out on the Schumann. If the RCO is coming to your area, make sure to see them!

Michel LeGrand is playing some new fun performances in New York at Birdland. And it’s going to be a great show too! This man has written many different scores and songs for movies, and he has in fact won several Oscars. He has a string quartett and played music of various styles in this great new concert. He played both classical plus some fun jazzy kinds of tunes. I wish I could’ve seen it myself. But he’s such a good performer that, even if you don’t like instrumental music, you will probably still enjoy this one a lot. It is one of the best concerts of the season, it seems, and you can hear the man who made the music actually perform it too!

K’NAAN has come out with a new album called “Troubadour”. In it, according to a radio show called Sound Opinions, the hip hop musician shows what kind of life he has led all this time. He is not just a regular rapper. He’s from Mogadishu and makes an important statement about that. He says that he comes from the worst ghetto of them all, because when he was a kid, the city was an active warzone in an awful civil war. Parts of the album are good, according to the radio show, other parts aren’t nearly so good, with the musician trying to do a lot more than he really could without giving them all a bit of short shrift. And the guest appearances are a bit overdone too.

One of the groups that we may be seeing on television as well as onstage around the country in the next little while is a group called Quest Crew. They are a dance group from the LA area. It’s all men around 20 years old and their performances so far have been outstanding. They are very talented and they just won America’s Best Dance Crew. They are incredibly creative and perform a whole lot of different kinds of styles, including clogging, as we found out last night. One of them can just spin on his head on top of a piano for hours at a time, it seems, and doesn’t fall down. The other groups in the competition were good too, and we’ll probably see a bunch of them doing interesting things in the future too, but they just weren’t able to hold off the Quest Crew.

Esa-Pekka Salonen is now working with the Philharmonia in the UK. And apparently his debut was very well done. The main piece of the concert was “City of Dreams: Vienna 1900-1935″, and it was beautifully done. He was able to hold the energy till just the right moment during Gurrelieder’s love songs in the piece. Conductors are sometimes just right for you to work with, but sometimes they don’t quite fit your needs the way you might otherwise hope. This time, in Salonen, it seems that the London-based orchestra has found someone that they can work with for years to come! Hopefully it keeps up as well as this first concert indicates.