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By Paul E. Robinson on April 4, 2015
Very few recordings I’ve heard in recent months have given me as much pleasure as this one. While Dvořák is one of my favourite composers, the Violin Concerto has always seemed to me more impressive on paper (score) than in live performance or on a recording...
(Continue reading)By Paul E. Robinson on March 28, 2015
Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt has played so much Bach and played it so well she has become known as one of the great Bach players of her time. In fact, her Bach reputation is so great that it is often assumed that she plays little else. Nothing could be further from the truth and this new CD provides conclusive evidence...
(Continue reading)By Paul E. Robinson on March 19, 2015
These performances were recorded live during the Pull Out All the Stops Festival launching the refurbished Royal Festival Hall organ, fully operational again for the first time since 2005. The organ sounds terrific and the performances are first-rate...
(Continue reading)By Paul E. Robinson on March 14, 2015
Elgar is practically part of the DNA of a certain group of Canadian classical music lovers; it goes with their Anglo-Saxon heritage and recognition of the Queen of England as their sovereign. For many classical music lovers in the United States and beyond, it is a different matter. Elgar’s music, while regularly programmed by British orchestras, was never widely performed or appreciated in the USA or Europe in the past and that is still the case today...
(Continue reading)By Paul E. Robinson on March 6, 2015
On the day that I played this new DVD celebrating the opening of the new Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, world news networks were reporting that prominent Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov had been murdered on the street near the Kremlin in Moscow. Yet another example of the ruthlessness of the Putin regime? Perhaps...
(Continue reading)By Paul E. Robinson on February 15, 2015
San Antonio, Texas | Even part-time Texans like myself (my wife and I have been living part of each year in Austin since 2005) tend to forget that San Antonio is the second largest city in Texas. Houston is No. 1 with about 2.1 million people, but San Antonio is not far behind at 1.3 million. In the latest census, Dallas came in at 1.2 million. Actually, the Dallas-Ft.Worth Metroplex is over 2 million. That said, San Antonio is still one of the largest cities in Texas and growing rapidly...
(Continue reading)By Paul E. Robinson on February 12, 2015
Tchaikovsky wrote ten operas, but only two of them, Eugen Onegin and Pique Dame, are performed with any regularity in opera houses outside Russia. His last opera, Iolanta, composed just before the Pathétique symphony, has recently received a good deal of attention, thanks to Anna Netrebko’s interest in it. In addition to being the subject of this new recording starring Netrebko, the opera is currently in production at the Met and will be screened Feb. 14 (encore/Feb. 18) as part of the Met’s Live in HD movie theatre series. Finally, tenor Sergey Skorokhodov will appear in a Dallas Opera production of Iolanta conducted by Emmanuel Villaume (April 10-18)...
(Continue reading)By Paul E. Robinson on February 5, 2015
Telluride, Colorado – My wife and I spend the winter months in Austin, Texas, for the most part, and count ourselves fortunate to be able to avoid the bitter cold and pesky blizzards that beset so much of our native Canada between November and April. Occasionally, however, we succumb to an irrational longing to “enjoy” the romance of winter once again. So it was that we accepted an invitation to spend a week in Telluride, Colorado, one of the skiing capitals of North America, with my brother-in-law and his wife...
(Continue reading)By Paul E. Robinson on January 29, 2015
Ukraine has often been in the news lately, and for all the wrong reasons. It is not easy sharing a border with Russia, especially after gaining its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Russia under Vladimir Putin resents Ukraine’s aspirations to move closer to the West and has acted militarily to crush them. First it was Crimea and now it is eastern Ukraine. NATO has been acting to support Ukraine but whether its efforts will be enough remains to be seen...
(Continue reading)By Paul E. Robinson on January 22, 2015
Tucson, Arizona | I caught up with conductor Roger McMurrin recently in Tucson, Arizona. In a few weeks time he was scheduled to make a return visit to Bishkek, Kyrgystan for a series of concerts, but home these days is Kiev, Ukraine where he has been making music and preaching the Gospel for the past 22 years...
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