Guides
Ever marveled at the array of signs for food along Park Avenue? With more than 30 restaurants, bars, and specialty food shops, it took me two full afternoons to visit every one. From favorites I know and love to businesses I'd never have noticed without a map, Park Avenue offers
Choice Concerts
Peanut butter and jelly. Rochester and spring. Rochester Oratorio Society and School of the Arts Concert Choir. "Better Together" is the title for the upcoming concert of choral classics, featuring works of Schubert, Mozart, Handel, and Morten Lauridsen (American, b. 1943). In addition, the School of the Arts Concert
Music Articles
"First time listeners who haven't heard the orchestra are often startled by the talented, excited, young musicians. When you put them on stage, it is really a terrific celebration of what music is about," says David Harman, conductor of the Rochester Philharmonic Youth Orchestra. What Harman described is exactly what
Choice Concerts
Madrigalia digs contemporary compositions for chamber choirs, and finds ways to put together the dollars to commission new works. Friday's concert headlines with the premiere of a set of madrigals composed by Cary Ratcliff on poems by e.e. cummings, commissioned by Madrigalia. Ratcliff studied composition and piano at Eastman
Choice Concerts
World-class concert pianist Jon Nakamatsu has a deep, musical relationship with Rochester that includes a 2007 all-Gershwin recording with the RPO, under the baton of Jeff Tyzik, which rose to No. 3 on Billboard's classical music charts. This season, Nakamatsu's only Rochester performance includes Juliana Athayde, violin (RPO concertmaster),
Choice Concerts
Beethoven's "Missa solemnis in D Major, Op. 123" is the work Herr Beethoven called his own greatest work. There are certain classical works that I will continue to argue simply must be heard live, and this is one of them. The power, majesty, and ecstasy Beethoven created in this
Choice Concerts
Looking for something made in America suitable for the whole family? This weekend RPO Pops conductor Jeff Tyzik brings us a multi-disciplinary performance of music and three-panel, panoramic screens of photographs in "Spurs and Spirit." Musical selections will include works by American composers Aaron Copland (1900-1990) and Samuel Barber
Music Articles
How often do you even hear of pianists performing on three concert-grand pianos during the same work? The odds are few, considering that the musical choices may be limited to Mozart, Bach, George Antheil, Morton Feldman, Steve Reich, and some Stravinsky transcriptions. On April 22, the audience at the
Choice Concerts
Three choral groups will be performing at St. Mary's Catholic Church in a program including Mendelssohn's "Hear My Prayer," Britten's "Jubilate Deo" and "Festival Te Deum," and Holst's "Ave Maria." The Eastman Women's Chorus is a select ensemble of students, and the University of Rochester Repertory Singers is a
Choice Concerts
Fingers will be flying up and down necks and in front of soundholes as guitarists from around the world grace Rochester locations from the Eastman School of Music to the Third Presbyterian Church and Bernunzio's Uptown Music as part of the Great Lakes Guitar Society's annual festival and competition.
Music Articles
There's a noticeable change in the buzz around so-called "New Music" these days, from the halls of Rochester's Eastman School of Music to the concert stage of Le Poisson Rouge in New York City. A genre of classical music that has been unfolding for decades has seemingly overnight come
Choice Concerts
The music department at the University of Rochester River Campus plays host to a "Day of Brass" this Saturday, beginning at 10 a.m. with the Alphorn, continuing at 11:30 a.m. with the RPO low-brass section, led by principal trombonist Mark Kellogg. After lunch, pick up "Everything You Need to
Choice Concerts
While many competition-based TV shows take a downward slide from one season to the next, "Classical Idol" just keeps getting better. More than 70 contestants applied from around the world to compete before a live audience and an esteemed panel of judges for a top prize of $2,000 and
Music Articles
"If you didn't know who had composed these pieces, I don't think there's any way you'd be able to tell she was female." So says Christopher Haritatos, co-artistic director of Publick Musick, about the group's upcoming performance of a program exclusively featuring the works of Isabella Leonarda, an Italian composer
Choice Concerts
Kaleidoscopes really are the neatest things, and to this day I have one on my desk. Bits of color, a twirl toward the sun, and you're promised an endless array of designs. Rochester Chamber Orchestra offers the same to the audience in its upcoming concert, "Musical Kaleidoscope," when it
Choice Concerts
Instruments, vocals, and step dancing. What more could you want for St. Patrick's Day? This weekend Celtic group Cherish the Ladies joins the RPO Pops for a special concert. The group began in 1985, taking its name from an Irish jig, and it blazed a trail as the first
Choice Concerts
I have a confession to make: I go ga-ga for Franz Liszt. So when Peter DuBois, music director at Third Presbyterian Church, e-mailed me to say that pianist Thomas Pandolfi would be playing a candlelight concert with five works by Liszt, I put it on my calendar - and so
Music Articles
Sacred and secular polyphony of the Renaissance sung as a five-voice vocal consort? If you've gotten spoiled by the likes of a cappella groups Musica Spei and its Renaissance Summer Sings, or Madrigalia, then here is your opportunity to listen to the unique offerings of Uncloistered. "Only one voice
Choice Concerts
It's a triple-header week for Christopher Seaman in his new role as "Conductor Laureate" of the RPO. Seaman will return Thursday and Saturday to conduct the RPO in a program of Shostakovich "Festive Overture," the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Major, and Elgar's Symphony No. 1. He'll
Choice Concerts
Rossini. I need not write another word for you to know that I am talking opera, and opera of the Italian variety specifically. This weekend, Empire State Lyric Theatre will launch its first Chamber Opera Festival, with an opening night production of Gioachino Rossini's "La Cambiale di Matrimonio," a
