Philadelphia Orchestra Saratoga Performing Arts Center August 4-21, 2010 After the Philadelphia Orchestra abruptly parted ways in 2008 with its seventh music director, Christopher Eschenbach, it turned to Charles Dutoit to fill in as chief conductor.  It’s a mighty long interim status for Dutoit, who will depart in 2012 with the arrival of Yannick Nezet-Seguin. The connection that made the Dutoit-Philly alliance a natural was his long status as artistic director and principal conductor of the orchestra’s annual August residency at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in upstate New York. Dutoit...

All Gershwin. All good. That pretty much describes the line-up as well as the outcome of Wednesday night at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. It was Charles Dutoit’s penultimate program as artistic director and principal conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s annual summer season and also a rare immersion into all-American terrain. Opening the program was “An American in Paris.” The honking strains of its opening bars are so ubiquitous that the rest of the piece felt revelatory, if still quite familiar. Beyond the bouncing appeal, the piece is actually quite a...

The name of the opera is “The Distant Sound.”  Yet the new production at Bard College’s SummerScape, which opens Friday night, will probably focus on plenty more than just sound.  If it holds true to the festival’s recent track record, it will also be spectacular to look at. Last year’s staging of “The Huguenots” was a feast of visual wonder with enormous set pieces, imaginative costumes and, most memorably, numerous staged references to famous paintings, starting with a tableaux of Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.” Returning from his success with “The Huguenots” is director...

The late composer Aaron Copland created a signature American sound in just a few distinctive orchestral works, including Appalachian Spring, Rodeo and Fanfare for the Common Man.  Pungent excerpts from these pieces are a part of every presidential inauguration. But his catalog is deep and not everything in it was one for the ages.  His only full length opera “The Tender Land,” which is currently playing at Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, is a reminder that even the beloved Copland was a fallible human. Outgoing Glimmerglass general manager Michael MacLeod made an admirable, if economic,...

A piece of American music seldom stays fresh, even surprising, to succeeding generations of audiences. Datedness sets in so quickly, while nostalgia takes a long time to show up. George Crumb’s “Black Angels” is an exception. Written almost 40 years ago during the height of the Vietnam War, “Black Angels” is scored for electric string quartet and is subtitled “Thirteen Images from the Dark Land.” The score is structured on theories of numerology and includes references to Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” and the “Dies Irae”...

With his solo rendition of “Beowulf,” coming up on Wednesday at Ozawa Hall, Benjamin Bagby may be the only musician during the Tanglewood season who will perform an entire evening without any written music. It’s not that he’s memorized a composition and left the sheet music at home. Yet the essence of his material is more than 1,000 years old. “Nothing that I’m performing is notated. I’m letting the melody of the language guide me through the story,” says Bagby, who will accompany himself on a six-string Celtic harp. “I do all kinds of different...

GLIMMERGLASS OPERA Cooperstown, New York PUCCINI: TOSCA Friday, July 9, 2010 (opening night) Big changes are underway at Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, with a new general and artistic director waiting in the wings to take over in the fall.  The internationally known stage director Francesca Zambello plans an expanded array of events for next year when the whole enterprise will become known as The Glimmerglass Festival. Yet the 2010 summer season got underway Friday night with the focus squarely on operatic tradition — in other words, lots of fine singing in a staple of the repertoire, Puccini’s...

NEW YORK CITY BALLET SARATOGA PERFORMING ARTS CENTER TUESDAY JULY 6, 2010 “All American” Fancy Free (Robbins/Bernstein) Red Angels (Dove/Einhorn) Barber Violin Concerto (Martins/Barber) Who Cares (Balanchine/Gershwin) With a roll of the snare drum and a cartwheel by a dancer, the New York City Ballet’s summer season got off to a fast start.  Tuesday night’s program at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center opened with “Fancy Free” the loveable 1944 tale of three sailors in a hurry to have some fun.  Played with ample swagger by Tyler Angle, Joaquin De Luz and Amar Ramasar, they...

Within moments after the curtain rises on Jorge Martin’s “Before Night Falls,” the hero collapses into his deathbed.  It’s an obvious allusion to all those consumptive operatic heroines of the romantic era and reinforces why the memoir of Cuban writer Renaldo Arenas was such a good choice for a staged adaptation. The Fort Worth Opera premiered the work in two performances at Bass Hall, as part of an early summer festival that also included “Don Giovanni” and “The Elixir of Love.”  I attended the matinee on Saturday, June 6. Arenas died of AIDS in 1990 at age 47 and the epidemic...

It’s difficult categorizing the new disc “Three Fervent Travelers” from the young string trio Time for Three, on E1 Entertainment. Is it blue grass or country, jazz improvisation or some new kind of classical?  One thing’s for certain. It’s fabulous. Time for Three is made up of violinists Zachary De Pue and Nick Kendall and bassist Ranaan Meyer.  They started improvising together in the halls of the Curtis Institute about eight years ago and have given hundreds of concerts across the country.  In New York’s Capital Region, they’ve appeared several time at the Saratoga...