I have been writing music reviews for a blog of music performances in the Boston area sponsored by the Harvard Musical Association.
My reviews try to find a balance between aspects of the music, the performances, and the sound of the venues. Several of them are however primarily dedicated to the reasons that the venues sound the way they do, and they may be the most interesting for readers of this blog. I have put them at the top of the list. The first two in the list were my attempt to put the best possible light on what I consider to be a disaster – the new Calderwood Hall at the Gardner Museum in Boston. Perhaps I was a lot too gentle. A good friend and well known acoustician commented about the review that “I did not know you could be so kind”. I offered to send a copy of the review to Yasuhisa Toyota. He was grateful for my “Acoustican’s Report”, which I wrote before I had heard the hall in concert. But I was told by the local Nagata representative that it would not be a good idea to forward the second review to Nagata.
January 24, 2012 - Acoustics Vs Performance: Clairmont Trio at ISGM
Last Sunday afternoon a sold-out crowd eagerly listened as Claremont Trio played in the new Calderwood Hall at the Gardner Museum. This article relates my experience listening to the performance from the first balcony in front of the musicians. My experience there was good – not great. Listeners in other areas of the first balcony had a much more variable experience, and on the whole they were disappointed.
January 11, 2012 - Calderwood Hall at ISGM: An Acoustician’s Report
This report is my preview of the eagerly awaited new music hall at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The new Calderwood Hall is replacing the Tapestry Gallery as the site for concerts. My observations are based partly on a guided tour a few weeks ago during which we heard no music, and partly on my ...
February 1, 2014 - New Music, New Sound in the Brooks Hall
Last Friday the Holy Cross music department celebrated the new Brooks Concert Hall with an eclectic combination of new and old music. The concert highlighted the strengths of the music faculty, as well as the acoustics of the newly renovated space.
May 11, 2013 - Rockport Revisited
Ed: The Rockport Chamber Music Festival in Rockport, MA, is set to open its second season in its sumptuous Shalin Liu Performance Center on June 9, and concerts will run through July 17. In honor of the first anniversary of the dedication of Rockport Music’s new home, BMInt is pleased to publish a very interestin
February 18, 2014 - Spaces Speak, and now a Masters Voice
Sound in an enclosed space is subject to myriad variables, not just the source’s output pattern—how the tonal balance changes with angle—but its reflections, how far away they come from, and how their own tonal balance gets changed by the reflecting surfaces. And finally, how where we listeners sit affects everything further.
January 24, 2012 - Death and Wonder from Masaaki Suzuki
In some ways Harvard’s Memorial Church was the ideal setting for Friday’s brilliant performance by Masaaki Suzuki and Yale’s renowned Schola Cantorum of three Bach cantatas. Although the concert was a delight almost anywhere in the church, when the words are not completely clear, something that Bach and Suzuki found of supreme value is missing.
October 11, 2011 - Recording Versus Marketing at BSO and Elsewhere
Asked to comment on John Newton’s recent Intelligencer article on recording and archiving at the BSO and to the comments therein here, BMInt writer David Griesinger responded in extraordinary detail (for a comment). We publish his response as an article. A reply to the comments after John Newton’s article would have to be book length
February 4, 2014 - Beethoven Visits Cambridge
Violinist Susanna Ogata and keyboardist Ian Watson inaugurated their Beethoven Project Monday for Cambridge Society for Early Music’s at Christ Church Cambridge, set to include over time, the composer’s entire sonata literature for violin and piano and solo piano. I felt the master vividly before me, as if playing his music his way on his own instrument.
November 11, 2013 - Brilliant Duo, Dubious Piano
A over-capacity audience flocked to the Hammond Performing Arts’ concert in Old South Church Sunday to hear two outstanding artists: Jan Müller-Szeraws, cello, and Ya-Fei Chuang, piano.
The Boston Camerata (joined by the Amherst Madrigal Singers) opened its season Sunday at the First Church of Boston with “Carmina Burana,” but certainly not the well known version by Carl Orff.
Cellist Ronald Thomas of the Boston Chamber Music Society opened BCMS’s Saturday night concert at Watertown’s Mosesian Theater with an aside: “I hope everybody’s going to be having fun with Voříšek’s Rondo, because I’m not going to be.”
January 28 2013 - Songs of Sorrow, Songs of Delight
The British/German tenor Rufus Müller, along with Stephen Hammer, oboe, Phoebe Carrai, cello, and Libor Dudas, keyboards, gave an unusually moving faculty artist recital at Longy School of Music of Bard College Sunday night. Müller has a gift for projecting music and text with amazing vocal technique and emotional power.
October 7, 2012 - Bartok’s, Beethoven’s Last-Minute Changes Shown
At the Wellfleet Congregational Church on Saturday, Borromeo Quartet’s Nicholas Kitchen projected manuscripts on a large screen and described how the composers’ last-minute changes in Bartók’s String Quartet No. 6 and Beethoven’s F-Major Razumovsky Quartet dramatically changed structures and meanings. The Borromeo then played the original upbeat ending of the Bartók sixth and the Beethoven quartet as he altered it.