TROY — The blazing technique of Stephen Hough can almost obscure his brilliant intelligence. But the British pianist’s ample gifts came together beautifully throughout his Sunday afternoon recital at Troy Savings Bank Music Hall. It was Hough’s third appearance under the aegis of the Troy Chromatics. Besides an acclaimed virtuoso, Hough is something of a scholar, offering his own program notes and a well received pre-concert...

Typical of a major conductor in our jet set age, Marin Alsop, who appears with the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center on Wednesday, has bases of operation located in a variety of far flung cities. First is Baltimore, where in September she begins her second year as the music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. With her 2005 appointment to the post she became the first female leader of a...

Union College Concert Series Schenectady, New York December 11, 2007 The boundaries between modernism and romanticism were blurred Tuesday night in the bold and unusual recital by pianist Jeremy Denk. Performing at Union College, the 37-year-old American offered only two sonatas, but each is a doozy: Ives’ “Concord” and Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier.” And his approach to each work was unexpected,...

For Jeremy Denk’s piano recital Tuesday night at Union College, there will be no appetizers, desserts or refreshing little side dishes, just a couple of big entrees: In an ambitious and daring program, the 37-year-old will tackle two of the most daunting piano sonatas in the repertoire, Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” and Ives’ “Concord.” “It’s kind of an exercise in wishful...

In 1988, accordionist and composer Pauline Oliveros made a recording with a trombone player and a percussionist inside a 2 million-gallon empty cistern buried 14 feet below ground at Fort Worden, near Port Townsend, Wash. The resulting CD on New Albion Records was titled “Deep Listening,” a play on the unusual location and also an apt description of the trio’s meditative and reverberant improvisations. Soon...

It was early July 1965, just a few nights before the grand opening of the new Saratoga Performing Arts Center. New York City Ballet dancer Shaun O’Brien and his companion, Broadway actor Cris Alexander, were in a taxi on their way to a late supper at Hattie’s Chicken Shack. The crusty cabdriver asked the two men what they were doing in town. O’Brien explained that he was with New York City Ballet, which was...

“I’m the type, if I see something I tackle it,” says classical pianist Anthony de Mare. And he’s not just speaking figuratively. The pianist, who makes his Carnegie Hall debut on March 15, is known for throwing his bulked-up body fully into his music making. In “Playin’ Myself,” his 2001 show that toured the U.S. and abroad, de Mare recited poetry, sang and even tap danced – all while playing the piano....

In the 10 years since classical guitarist Sharon Isbin came out publicly as a lesbian, she’s won a Grammy Award, and has had one recording after another hit the Billboard charts. So much for the dangers of living an open life. Isbin has become the preeminent classical guitarist of our time on her own terms – by studying Bach but also embracing world music, and by commissioning some of today’s most adventuresome composers...

“Very often I have invitations to go to dinner parties with heads of states or royalty or ambassadors or whoever and I’ll always say I have a companion with me and I’d like him to be invited,” says the French classical pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, 41. “And though I don’t say it, what that basically means is if he’s not invited I’ll not come.” In demand around the globe,...