Has the highpoint of the local concert season already come and gone? Only time will tell, but it will be a tall order to surpass the splendor of Garrick Ohlsson’s all-Chopin recital. The Thursday night concert (9/30) in the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall launched the 114th year of presentations by the Troy Chromatics. A deep dive into the Chopin repertoire hasn’t been a common occurrence for recitalists lately, at least locally. His music has typically been presented as bonbons amidst more seemingly substantial fare. If it’s deployed to make any kind of point, it’s usually about the virtuoso...

Music and food have always gone together well, but seldom have they been presented as equals on a stage. Walking the Dog Theatre is serving up just such a combination with “Bon Appetit!” An original theatrical, musical and culinary tribute to Julia Child, the show is produced in association with Diamond Opera Theater. It plays at the Basilica Industria in Hudson for eight performances through Sept. 24. Every performance culminates in free tastings of pastries and other sweets by local chefs. “Bon Appetit!” of course, was the name of Child’s popular television show,...

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...

Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra Ozawa Hall, August 16, 2010 Who better than a 102-year old man to ask the question, “What are years?” Composer Elliott Carter, who’s centennial was celebrated two summers ago at Tanglewood, was back again Monday night for the finale of the annual Festival of Contemporary Music in Ozawa Hall.  One of his newest pieces is a setting of five poems by Marianne Moore and uses her line, “What Are Years,” as the title. Judging from the score, performed by the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra and soprano Sarah Joanne Davis, Carter’s longevity has given him...

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...