Teacher and student, together in Toronto.
The music was by Mozart, Bach and Tchaikovsky – but the TSO’s concert on Saturday night was really all about two living musicians.
The two musicians were Peter Oundjian and Itzhak Perlman, sharing the stage at Roy Thomson Hall. However, their usual roles were reversed: Oundjian, the TSO’s music director for the last eight years, appeared as a “guest” violinist; and for most of the concert, virtuoso-violinist Perlman served as the TSO’s conductor.
The Tokyo String Quartet.
This just in: the Tokyo String Quartet will disband at the end of the 2012-13 season.
The news comes as a bit of a shock. Only a few months ago the quartet announced it would be replacing retiring violist Kazuhide Isomura and second violinist Kikuei Ikeda with new players.
A scene from Opera Atelier's Armide.
Here’s my review from today’s Globe and Mail newspaper.
When Toronto’s Opera Atelier announced that its production of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Armide would be touring to Paris this spring, it sounded like a big step.
But, as anyone who attends Armide will learn, the big step looks to be a surefooted one. Toronto’s “period” baroque opera company has drawn on resources it’s built up over the years to remount a 2005 production that’s firing on all cylinders.
Pianist Jon Kimura Parker
Here is an interview with Jon Kimura Parker that I wrote for today’s Houston Chronicle.
Like most concert pianists, Houston’s Jon Kimura Parker gives performances all over the world. This season alone, his engagements take him from England to Hawaii.
Yet Friday-Sunday he’ll be commuting between Jones Hall and his home in Southampton to play Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1, with the Houston Symphony and guest conductor Pablo Heras-Casado.
John Relyea, son of Gary Relyea.
Here’s something that I wrote for today’s Globe and Mail newspaper. And here’s a trivia challenge: John and Gary Relyea have only once appeared in the same opera production. Can anyone name it?
Samuel Johnson famously called opera “an exotic and irrational entertainment,” but there are a few people in the world who can also justifiably call it something else: the family business.
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