| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 11-Apr-2013 Lincoln Center: Avery Fisher Hall | Messiaen, Mozart and Murail offer a kaleidoscope of colors and sounds at the New York Philharmonic |
 “Synesthesia” is a neurological condition that causes an involuntary sensory experience to be provoked from an initial stimulation of a different sensory or cognitive pathway – for instance, automatically associating colors with numbers, letters, or sounds. Olivier Messiaen, a 20th-century French composer, organist, and ornithologist, “heard” colors in all music, whether tonal, modal, or serial. His own compositions are undeniably colorful themselves, dating back to his early composition Les offrandes oubliées (“The Forgotten Offerings”).Read full review... | |
| 3-Feb-2013 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | Embodying Beethoven's Ninth: Barenboim and WEDO conclude at Carnegie |
.jpg) Unity over division, peace over war, a higher cause for humanity: no symphony better expresses the mission of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra than Beethoven’s Ninth, and no orchestra plays this symphony with greater emotional power. With Daniel Barenboim on the rostrum, this symphony’s composed, collective redemption becomes at once entirely natural and entirely miraculous.Read full review... | |
| 1-Dec-2012 Walt Disney Concert Hall | Salonen and the LA Phil outstanding in the music of Lutosławski |
 Sharing a concert with Beethoven can be a tough assignment. The old stalwart is, with good reason, still a popular draw to the concert hall. As part of its centenary celebration of Witold Lutosławski, the LA Phil chose to pair music of Beethoven with that of the Polish composer. While such a technique would commonly be used to draw a crowd for a concert featuring “modern” music, in this case it was a much more insightful move with surprising results.Read full review... | |
| 20-Jul-2012 Royal Albert Hall | Prom 9: Barenboim begins |
 Why would you ever perform Beethoven 1 and 2 today? Beethoven wrote seven later symphonies which are clearly better. That's kind of the point of Beethoven. Looking back on these two quite early works given knowledge of those masterful symphonies yet to come, it's hard to justify their performance except as stages in a story – a story which, if truth be told, is pretty familiar.
Read full review... | |
