Author: Philip Gardner

Watch and listen here.

The above quote, ascribed to Richard Strauss, is said to have originated during a rehearsal for the world premiere of Strauss’s ELEKTRA, in which Ernestine Schumann-Heink was cast as Klytemnestra and the composer was conducting.

Perhaps it was the beginning of a trend towards conductors allowing opera orchestras to swamp the singers…a trend much in evidence at The Met these days.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sunday November 30th, 2025 matinee – This will be brief, since I did not stay for the entire opera. Having found much to admire in Daniele Rustioni’s conducting of DON GIOVANNI on November 15th, I was curious to hear what he might do with LA BOHEME. The cast featured singers I love: Juliana Grigoryan as Mimi, Stephen Costello as Rodolfo, Mané Galoyan as Musetta, Alexander Köpeczi as Colline, Iurri Samoilov as Schaunard, and Donald Maxwell as Benoit/Alcindoro. New to me was the excellent and big-voiced baritone David Bizic as Marcello.

As the first act progressed, it became evident that the conductor was not particularly interested in supporting the singers. Like other current Met conductors, he seemed intent on grabbing every chance to have the orchestra play loud and fast, sometimes covering the voices. 

Oc course, there were beautiful moments along the way: Costello’s hauntingly prophetic “Che visa da malata…” when he first gazes at Mimi, and his ravishing pianissimo (down to a whisper) at the end of his aria; Ms. Grigoryan’s narrative was so appealing, especially at “Ma quando vien lo sgelo“, wherein she took her time, luxuriating in the  lovely warmth of her timbre. But the intro to the love duet was too grandly played from the pit, spoiling the poetry of the couple’s first exchanges of affection. Mr. Costello harmonized on the duet’s final note…something I wish more tenors would do.

The tenor sang lovingly as he introduced Mimi to his comrades at Cafe Momus, and Mssrs. Köpeczi and Samoilov (who have more to sing in this scene than one might think) excelled. Ms. Galoyan, arriving at Momus, eschewed the usual screeching that many Musettas use to attract attention; her Waltz was caressingly sung, with a spectacular diminuendo on the top-B as the end. Then Mr. Bizic showed us the value of a powerful voice as he reprised the waltz theme…Bravo! The marching band and the pit players provided a noisy finale to the scene, at time slightly out of sync. 

In the last minutes of the Momus ecene, I decided not to stay for the rest of the opera…there would be a 45-minute intermission coming, followed by a 30-minute one after the tavern scene…and then there was to be a “Curtain Chat” after the opera ended, meaning a long wait at the stage door to meet these people who had given us a beautiful BOHEME…despite the intrusive music that sometimes rose from the pit.

Back on November 8th, I’d been at a BOHEME conducted by Keri-Lynn Wilson; on that afternoon, I was happy to experience a performance where the voices never seemed to vanish behind a wall of orchestral sound. Talking to some of the singers after the show, they had kind words for Ms. Wilson. I couldn’t help but wish that she had been on the podium this afternoon.

~ Oberon

At a 1974 performance of Strauss’s ARIADNE AUF NAXOS at the New York City Opera, the tenor singing Bacchus began running out of steam as the opera reached its finale. Just as it seemed he might not make it thru the arduous final bars of his role, soprano Johanna Meier started singing the lines with him.

All’s well as ends well.

Antonietta Stella is Cio-Cio-San in a 1958 radio broadcast from The Met of Puccini’s MADAMA BUTTERFLY.

Listen here.

CAST:

Cio-Cio-San – Antonietta Stella; Pinkerton – Eugenio Fernandi; Suzuki – Margaret Roggero; Sharpless – Clifford Harvuot; Goro – Alessio De Paolis; Bonze – Ezio Flagello; Yamadori – George Cehanovsky; Kate Pinkerton – Madelaine Chambers; Commissioner – Calvin Marsh

The conductor is Dimitri Mitropoulos

Although I didn’t get to the Old Met until 1963, when Stella and Fernandi were no longer singing there, I saw most of the other singers in this BUTTERFLY cast numerous times in the ensuing years. Ezio Flagello was a perfect Leporello in my first-ever Met performance, and Calvin Marsh was Leporello that same night.

~ Author: Oberon

Sunday November 23rd, 2025 – Violinist Benjamin Beilman and pianist Gloria Chien presenting a program of works ranging thru three centuries tonight at Alice Tully Hall. Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center is focusing on the violin this season – their Winter Festival is entitled ‘Violin Celebration’ – and tonight’s Beilman/Chien concert might be thought of a delicious prelude to the festival: it was one of the finest violin recitals of my many years of experience.

The violin itself was the focal point this evening, and, after his opening piece, the violinist gave a heartfelt speech extolling the magical instrument that he plays: the fabled Bartolomeo Giuseppe Guarneri ‘del Gesù’, 1740.

The evening opened with Eugène Ysaÿe’s Sonata in D-minor for Violin, Op. 27, No. 3, “Ballade”. Composed in 1923, this single-movement solo work is in two sections: a sort of recitative that gives way to an Allegro. The Lento opening a has yearning quality before a livelier feeling develops into the  Allegro section, wherein Mr. Beilman reveled in the music’s virtuoso demands. His playing – from poignant to passionate – was alive with fabulous tone quality, perfect dynamic control, and remarkably fluent technical prowess. His performance elicited a lively ovation from the crowd; the evening is off to a marvelous start.

Béla Bartók’s Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano, BB 85, was written a year before the Ysaÿe. A single low note from Ms. Chien at the Steinway opens the sonata. The music is full of mood swings, from mysteriously weighted to vigorous folk-dance motifs. Ms. Chien’s playing, veering from dreamlike to the edge of wildness, perfectly merges with the Beilman sound: by turns soulful and sprightly. The sonata’s understated ending was so expressively rendered by the two artists, with the violin ethereally on high.

Karol Szymanowski composed his Nocturne and Tarantella for Violin and Piano, Op. 28, in 1915. The Nocturne opens with a mystical piano introduction, the violin entering low and pensive before ascending to some high trills; here Ben Beilman’s control was strikingly in evidence. Now the Tarantella strikes up: Spanish and Italian influences are evident, but also – oddly – traces of old Asian harmonies. The dance begins wildly, lulls into a more thoughtful mood, then on to an epic finish. 

I have yet to hear a Chris Rogerson piece I didn’t like. Tonight, having its New York premiere, was the composer’s Arietta for Violin and Piano…and it’s another winner. Mr. Rogerson – unlike many comtemporary composers – is not afraid of melody, nor of sentiment. The Arietta has a dreamy start as a lovely theme emerges. Both musicians summon their most poetic sounds, with Ben in the highest range especially exquisite. There’s a pause, and then Ms. Chien sets up a low, steady piano figuration over which Ben takes up a new flow of melody. The music becomes ecstatic, then tranquil. There’s a piano solo before the piece ends softly. The composer joined the players onstage, to enthusiastic applause.

The concert ‘s finale was César Franck’s Sonata in A-major for Violin and Piano, which dates from 1886. This piece was inspired by the marriage of violinist Eugène Ysaÿe to Louise Bourdeau, in the same year.

Franck originally planned a slow, thoughtful start to the piece, but Ysaÿe thought a more upbeat tempo would be better, so it became an Allegretto…though preserving a dreamy quality as well. Silken playing from both violinist and pianist was simply gorgeous as the familiar theme – to be heard throughout the piece – blossomed. Brief solo piano interludes feel like small poems in Ms. Chien’s interpretation. 

Passion marks the second movement; Ben’s playing is captivatingly expressive, and a sense of drama never flags. The signature theme is heard on high, and the movement ends after an agitato interlude.

Sometimes described as Wagnerian in its wistful, Tristanesque feeling, the unusual Recitativo-Fantasia third movement refers to the ever-essential theme, now re-imagined. A violin mini-cadenza brings Ben to a sweet melody that turns expansive: at once incredibly tender and sad. A slow build-up evaporates into a shimmering motif from the piano; the violin singing hauntingly overall. Now the great theme sounds magnificently before fading away as if in a dream.

The familiarity of that theme is reassuring, and in the final movement, the playing of it is exceptionally pure and clean…following an interlude from Ms. Chien’s keyboard, the heart-stopping beauty of the theme is presented one more time, searlingly played by Mr. Beilman: simply grand.

A full-house standing ovation greeted the players as they came out for a bow, Ms. Chien in a beautiful plum-coloured frock and Mr. Beilman such a dapper gentleman. Further down our row, violist Matthew Lipman joined in applauding his colleagues after their outstanding performance. A Paganini encore, masterfully played, again let us savour the sound of the Bartolomeo Giuseppe Guarneri ‘del Gesù’…285 years old, and now in the hands of a 21^st century Master.

~ Oberon

Above: Maestro Dima Slobodeniouk and violinist Augustin Hadelich onstage at David Geffen Hall; photo by Brandon Patoc

~ Author: Lane Raffaldini Rubin

Saturday November 22nd, 2025 – On Saturday night, the New York Philharmonic wrapped up a run of performances featuring American-German violinist Augustin Hadelich and Russian-born Finnish conductor Dima Slobodeniouk. Hadelich, who will return to David Geffen Hall in January to present an Artist Spotlight recital, tonight played Samuel Barber’s affable violin concerto. The rest of the program focused on Finnish music, with the New York premiere of the decade-old Stonework by Sebastian Fagerlund, and Jean Sibelius’s Symphony No. 2.

Samuel Barber wrote one of the least hubristic concertos in the violin literature, foregrounding melody and interplay between the soloist and the orchestra rather than virtuosic display. Hadelich’s playing and stage presence suit the piece very well, despite a number of moments when he was overpowered by the Slobodeniouk and the Philharmonic. Geffen Hall is not acoustically generous to violin soloists, a fact which a conductor more experienced in this hall may have more deftly addressed.

Hadelich gave the opening solo of the first movement a darker tone than is typically heard and allowed his sound to bloom into a full, even primaveral sweetness. He maintained the intensity of his tone and vibrato across the full range of the instrument, which had the effect of bringing a lovely satin tone to the usually more metallic upper reaches of the violin.

Hadelich received an extended, warm ovation from the audience and played his own arrangement of Orange Blossom Special, a popular fiddle tune by Ervin T. Rouse that Johnny Cash later immortalized in concerts and recordings. Hadelich’s version featured many of the bravura techniques that Barber’s concerto lacks and showed off his brilliant skill. The crowd was audibly entertained and impressed.

Stonework was written as a standalone tone poem in 2014-15 and later became the first in a trilogy, followed by Drifts (2017) and Water Atlas (2017-19). Fagerlund’s music tends toward the vast, the evocative, and the cinematic. Slobodeniouk’s hurried starting tempo proved too active for the atmospheric music that opens the piece, a smattering of sharp attacks over a continuous chord across the orchestra. Presumably these figures are meant to conjure sparking flints, an effect hindered by what became a uniform blanket of sound from the orchestra.

In one passage that unleashes the full forces of the brass and percussion, producing an impressively towering sonority from the orchestra, Slobodeniouk could have managed a better balance across the orchestra so that the intricate material in the strings would have been intelligible. For the first time in my listening life, here we had too much cowbell. A soft, sustained section lent the second half of the piece a sense of mystery and cinematic texture that built in tension and direction to the end.

Fagerlund’s vision of an abstract Finnish landscape was set against Sibelius’s own from a century earlier, which Slobodeniouk approached with technicolor vibrance starting with the very first contoured hillocks in the strings that open the first movement. Slobodeniouk ran the risk of over-determining the shapes of each phrase, but the reward was a superbly crafted first movement. The strings sounded consistently opulent and each capacious brass passage was accompanied by a satisfying sense of arrival.

Slobodeniouk kept this up in the second and third movements as well. In the second movement he drew out earthy, Stravinskian sounds from the double-reeds and brass and he made the downright weird scribbles of fast notes in the strings at the very end of the movement make sense with a fast, thundering energy.

But Slobodeniouk’s pacing couldn’t sustain this arc all the way through the piece. The fourth movement seemed gushy and maudlin in contrast to the craftsmanship of the prior movements and the orchestra pulled stubbornly against some of his desired tempos. It was a disappointing way to end, after Slobodeniouk had demonstrated his ability to draw out superb detail and longer dramatic arcs from the Philharmonic.

~ Lane Raffaldini Rubin

Author: Mark Anthony Martinez II 

Wednesday November 19th, 2025 – The Voices of Ascension Gala this year took place at the Museum of the City of New York and was a splendid affair, filled with interesting people and beautiful music. The Gala had two special guests who were being honored at the event: Anthony Roth Costanzo (photo above), countertenor opera star and also the General Director and President of Opera Philadelphia, as well as Alexandra Munroe, Senior Curator at Large, Global Arts, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation; Chair, Aspen Music Festival and School.

The event started with a cocktail reception where the attendees mingled and chatted while the night’s honorees flitted around chatting amongst the crowd. Everyone was in a festive mood, and some of the outfits that people wore truly seemed like they had come straight off a runway in terms of how daring and avant-garde they were.

Once the party aspect of the gala had settled down, the musical portion of the night began. The audience sat on the ground floor of the museum, below the spiral staircase, as both Costanzo and Munroe were honored with lifetime achievement awards.

The program was an eclectic mix of Renaissance to modern pieces that highlighted the many things that Voices of Ascension has to offer.

The program started with a piece, El Grillo, by composer Josquin des Prez, a Renaissance composer from what is now modern-day France. The piece was performed by a quartet of singers from Voices of Ascension: Liz Lang (soprano), Kirsten Sollek (contralto), Chad Kranak (tenor), and Joseph Beutel (bass-baritone).

The piece was jaunty and very characteristically medieval—but in the best way. The singers performed with such energy that the music was truly brought to life. The quartet was so animated with their singing that what could have been just a choral work became a real performance.

The next piece performed was a new composition that had its world premiere at the gala. The piece, Mine Ear, My Eye, My Hand, was composed by Nico Muhly and written in honor of Alexandra Munroe. The piece was again performed beautifully by the quartet of singers and provided a nice counterpoint to the medieval piece just performed.

The next piece was a cello and voice duet called Changing Light by Kaija Saariaho. The artists in this piece were Alice Teyssier (soprano) and Dr. Tommy Mesa (cello). The piece was interesting and used a good deal of extended vocal technique on the part of Teyssier. At times, it seemed baroque in styling but definitely ventured further into a more modern soundscape than the preceding modern piece.

After Changing Light was performed, the quartet of a cappella singers returned to sing a piece called TaReKiTa by Reena Esmail. The piece derives its name from the Indian drum, the tabla, and the sounds that it makes. The piece’s text was entirely based on the phonemes from the title itself—Ta, Re, Ki, Ta. It was an interesting percussive song that explored how the human voice could connect to such a different type of instrument and emulate it.

The penultimate piece was a classic: Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. Mesa returned to perform the cello masterpiece wonderfully. The mini concert was able to move through so many different genres and eras of music so well, and having a perennial classic like this was a great way to anchor all the other pieces.

The final piece was perhaps the most anticipated, because one of the guests of honor, Costanzo, performed Vivaldi’s Sol da te, mio dolce amore from Orlando Furioso. Costanzo will be performing a pastiche opera from Vivaldi’s works at Opera Philadelphia in the coming year, so this might also have been a preview of that new (and old) piece.

Costanzo is at home in this baroque aria and performed deftly and beautifully. I’ve heard several countertenors over the years, and Costanzo certainly ranks among the top. He sounds so natural in a way that is often hard to achieve with countertenor repertoire and worked so well with the instrumentation. On a fun note, the flutist who performed the lion’s share of the instrumental melody was Ms. Teyssier, who performed the modern vocal piece earlier in the concert.

Once the piece, and the concert, was over, the audience gave a warm applause and ovation for the musicians and honored guests of the night.

~ Mark Anthony Martinez II

Above: Nicolas Altstaedt and Thomas Dunford; photo by Fadi Kheir

Author: Lane Raffaldini Rubin

Tuesday November 18th and Thursday November 20th, 2025 – This week, Carnegie Hall presented two very distinct baroque programs. The first, on Tuesday, featured cellist Nicholas Altstaedt and lutenist Thomas Dunford in Weill Hall and the second, on Thursday, featured the ensemble L’Arpeggiata in Zankel Hall. Both performances were led by lutenists (Christina Pluhar in the case of L’Arpeggiata) and acted like jam sessions, to differing degrees, where improvisation linked major components of the programs together.

Altstaedt and Dunford presented a loose program centered on Marin Marais and J.S. Bach which also included Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel, winning them inclusion in Carnegie’s ongoing celebratory Pärt series. L’Arpeggiata’s program, titled “Wonder Women” after their 2024 album, was muddied by last-minute changes necessitated by the withdrawal of one of the featured vocalists due to illness. Intending to feature only works by women composers and traditional songs about women, the evening did include several works by men—and all of this was played by the almost exclusively male ensemble.

Tuesday’s program began with Marais’s breezy La rêveuse. Although Marais and Antoine Forqueray (whose music we also heard) played and composed for the viola da gamba (for no less prestigious patrons than the royal court of Versailles), Altstaedt performed these works on the violoncello. The two instruments resemble one another but differ in ways that result in distinct technical abilities and challenges. The viola da gamba’s six strings are tuned at smaller intervals than the cello’s four strings and the former features a much flatter, fretted fingerboard, which makes it well suited to playing chords and using the bow to cross the strings back and forth.

Altstaedt’s playing often hindered the fluidity of Marais’s more melodic pieces as well as some of the rollicking passagework of selections like Forqueray’s La Leclair. Altstaedt, who is not strictly a performer of early music, was not at ease in the gamba music on the program. He became an altogether different musician when he played Bach’s Cello Suite No. 5, however, giving us highly disciplined bowing technique, characterful dance rhythms, and a series of strikingly hushed fast passages.

But Dunford was the evident leader and star of the evening. One got the clear sense that this was his program and Altstaedt was along for the ride. Dunford, who always brings charisma and congeniality to the stage, plays the theorbo with such comfort that the instrument seems merely an extension of his body. Between most pieces on the program, Dunford riffed improvisatory interludes and, at one point, even threw in his transcription of Erik Satie’s Gnossienne No. 1 as a treat. Most notable was his arrangement of Bach’s famed Cello Suite No. 1, which he treated with ripe sweetness, occasional vibrato, and gorgeously froggy tone in the lower register. Dunford’s arrangement made the piece a natural fit for the theorbo, despite its differences from the instrument for which Bach wrote the piece.

Dunford’s transcription of Spiegel im Spiegel suited Pärt’s music just as well, not dressing Pärt in baroque clothing but demonstrating the outside-of-time nature of Pärt’s tintinnabuli compositions. The cello floats above harp-like arpeggios and low drones in the theorbo. The two voices add up to a gorgeously simple lullaby and an exercise in patient listening. This Spiegel im Spiegel is in a way the opposite of Marais’s Couplets de folies (which wrapped up the first half of the program), a set of variations based on the extremely popular Spanish “folia” melody and chord progression which piles on more and more intricacy, technical bravura, and sheer sound as it barrels to its conclusion. Spiegel im Spiegel begins near silence and remains there, giving us only what is necessary to sustain beautiful music.

On Thursday L’Arpeggiata presented a robust setlist of music taken from folk sources, rustic popular traditions, and aristocratic women composers. I call it a setlist because L’Arpeggiata approaches music-making much the way jazz musicians do, with emphasis on improvisation, riffing, sharing solos, expressing feeling over refinement, and not taking oneself too seriously.

The players and singers brought pure joy to the music. Doron Sherwin, on the traditional cornetto, leaned into moments of tone bending and hammed up the melodic lines of a traditional Italian canzona that may as well have been composed by Nino Rota. Tobias Steinberger reveled in extended tambourine solos that entranced the audience. As the evening progressed, the vocalists loosened up and infused their singing with dance steps and intricate series of narrative hand gestures. The male alto Vincenzo Capezzuto’s take on Lo guarracino, a Neapolitan comedic song that tells the story of a small fish in love with a sardine and, according to Pluhar, describes “fish wars” and includes “a hundred verses of fish names in Neapolitan” was funny and impressive. Capezzuto sang with confidence and never stumbled.

Christina Pluhar (above) has a much more understated stage presence than Dunford but took a moment to shine in Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger’s “Toccata arpeggiata” from the first book of the Intavolatura di chitarrone (this piece is the source of the ensemble’s name). Kapsberger is the most interesting composer for the theorbo and Pluhar brought out a striking sense of mystery in his music.

The Chilean-Swedish mezzo-soprano Luciana Mancini was a standout, singing with a sultry and viscous tone in very low tessitura and almost exclusively in Spanish. In the traditional Mexican song La bruja, which closed the program, Mancini began with a witchy laugh and offered a gorgeously haunting, gravelly recounting of a sorceress and her conquests and tribulations.

The academic stil moderno songs of Barbara Strozzi and Francesca Caccini—themselves fascinating figures in the man’s world of baroque Florence and Venice—were peppered in as well and offered some beautifully dramatic vocal writing. But the program’s Neapolitan tavern songs and Mexican ballads offered a rare and captivating glimpse into the roots of many idioms that we can still recognize in today’s popular music from around the world.

~ Lane Raffaldini Rubin

The Hungarian mezzo-soprano Júlia Hamari singing songs of Brahms and Strauss from a 1974 recital given at Hilversum, Netherlands, in 1974. Konrad Richter is the pianist.

Listen here.

In 1982, I saw Ms. Hamari as a lovely Rosina in Rossini’s BARBIERE DI SIVIGLIA with the Metropolitan Opera on tour in Boston. Her excellent colleagues were Rockwell Blake, Pablo Elvira, Sesto Bruscantini, and Jerome Hines. Sir Andrew Davis conducted.

~ Author: Oberon

Wednesday November 19th, 2025 – An all-Taylor evening at Lincoln Center opened with SCUDORAMA, continued with SUNSET, and ended with Taylor’s signature work, ESPLANADE.  

This was my second SCUDORAMA of the current season; thru the years, I have found myself changing my mind about this piece every time I see it. Earlier in the current season, I found it wasn’t reaching me on any level, aside from the dancing itself. Tonight, I thought the score was fascinating, and that there’s lots to like about the staging and choreography…as well as lots that seems incomprehensible. 

The musicians of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, conducted by David LaMarche, really got into it tonight. At the performance 2 weeks ago, my companion had found that the Clarence Jackson score has a Bernstein feeling to it; tonight, I could hear that reference clear as a bell. 

The dancing was exceptional tonight; Devon Louis and Kenny Corrigan excelled in their duet, as did Gabielle Barnes and Madelyn Ho in theirs; and Kristin Draucker and Mr. Louis make a marvelous partnership. The dark clouds in a post-apocalypse sky remain an intriguing mystery. 

Paul Taylor’s SUNSET is one of the Master’s finest lyrical masterpieces. Created in 1983, the set and lighting by Alex Katz and Jennifer Tipton’s lighting create a uniquely peaceful atmosphere; but there are undercurrents of tension as well. The luminous music by Edward Elgar is made more affecting by the recorded cries of loons.

A group of young soldiers in red berets are hanging out in a park at twilight; perhaps they’re awaiting marching orders for the coming morn. The set is so simple: bare branches of trees, painted on bare walls, imply that its Autumn…and a rail fence could be an allusion to a ballet barre. 

Girls in white dresses come by to flirt: Madelyn Ho, Kristin Draucker, Jada Pearman, and Jessica Ferretti all look so innocent. The soldiers – Lee Duveneck, Alex Clayton, Devon Louis, John Harnage, Kenny Corrigan, and Patrick Gamble – seem at times swaggering, at others…uncertain. A duet for Lee Duveneck and John Harnage alludes to something beyond soldierly camaraderie, and the ever-lovely Madelyn Ho shines in a dance of almost childlike playfulness. Jada Pearman is radiant in a section with the boys that seems to evoke a remembered time. A dropped beret as the soldiers move out is saved as a souvenir; many years hence, it will be found stashed in a bureau drawer and produce a flood of memory.      

Kudos again to the St. Luke’s players, under Tara Simoncic’s baton, for their entrancing playing of Elgar’s music. The recorded loon calls lend a nostalgic air, though my companion found then somewhat ominous.

I never tire of ESPLANADE, one of Taylor’s most perfect meshings of music and movement. Violinists Krista Bennion Feeney and Alex U Fortes regaled us with their playing of the timelessly evocative music of Bach; their St. Luke’s colleagues, under Maestro LaMarche’s baton, made us feel that everything’s right with the world. 

The dancers – Kristin Draucker, Jada Pearman, Jessica Ferretti, Gabrielle Barnes, Emmy Wildermuth, and Elizabeth Chapa with Lee Duveneck, Devon Louis, and Austin Kelly – danced to perfection. I’ve been very much taken with Ms. Barnes this season; she – and all the dancers – seemed to be inspired Bach’s music, making for many truly gorgeous moments as ESPLANADE unfolded tonight..  

In the ballet’s final movement, famous for Paul Taylor’s choreography which calls on the dancers to race about the stage at hi-velocity whilst periodically flinging themselves to the floor, the dancers were astounding. This is a risky business, but tonight the dancers seemed bent on challenging one another to feats of derring-do. In a solo passage, Emily Wildermuth captivated the crowd with her extraordinary passion and commitment. Earlier in the piece, Emily had shown another facet of her dancing in a lyrical duet with Devon Louis.

ESPLANADE ends as the dancers rush off in different directions, leaving the irresistible Jada Pearman alone onstage, opening her arms as if to embrace all of us.

For a while, this iconic moment in dance was owned by Michelle Fleet. Tonight, I was thinking back to my earliest Taylor experiences, at Jacob’s Pillow back in the late 1970s, and how the roster has evolved over the years. Dancers with extraordinary technical prowess and engrossing personalities have passed their roles onto the next generations, and the Taylor flame burns as brightly as ever. 

It was in this pensive mood that one of my favorite Taylor heroes, Take Ueyama, came over tonight to say hello. 

~ Oberon