Last Sunday, going stir crazy on a nasty rainy day, I took (dragged) my son and a friend of my daughter’s out to hear a woodwind quintet called PUFF! at South Orange Performing Arts Center in NJ ($10–15). The ensemble, in residence at Juilliard (an participants in the upcoming Focus! Festival, details after the jump), where all its members are graduate students, performed two of the better-known works for woodwind quintet—Barber’s Summer Music and Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin—and after intermission they played a piece I had never heard before, David Maslanka’s Woodwind Quintet No. 3, which incorporated bits of Bach chorale melodies into its playful, inventive texture.
Our little threesome sat in the tenth row, and though I feared we would be by far the youngest members of the audience there were several other families with children ranging from gurgling babies and squirming toddlers to me with my 12-year-old and 16-year-old. read more
A modest stack of new Bach CDs has been piling up on my desk over the last several months—when you’re a Bach-lover it’s hard for this not to happen periodically. There are keyboard sonatas (David Fray), violin sonatas (David Grimal), The Art of Fugue (Pierre-Laurent Aimard), two- and three-part Inventions (Till Fellner), and even a version of the Goldberg Variations played on harp (Catrin Finch). There are lots of cantatas—BWV numbers 6, 12, 21, 41, 60, 68, 99, 117, 172, 182, 197, sung by people like soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, Emma Kirkby, Michael Chance, Barbara Schlick, Andreas Scholl, and Christoph Prégardien.
And there are three recordings of the cantata “Ich habe genug” (BWV 82), whose subject is the wish for death, sung in shades from mournful and wistful to resigned and frenzied. Over time, this has been one of the most popular cantatas performed or recorded—it probably won’t ever approach the reportedly 200+ covers of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” but it’s impressive nonetheless. Especially in the context of a business—the record industry—that has shrunk to just a sliver of its former self. read more
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