Eleven years ago, a young singer arrived in Miami from Havana and joined the Florida Grand Opera chorus for three years while becoming a sensation in the Cuban-American community as a performer of arias and zarzuelas.
Florida Grand Opera opened its 68th season Saturday at the Ziff Ballet Opera House on a night with more original elements than within recent memory: a new production of Verdi's la Traviata, new orchestra, new chorusmaster, and a conductor and cast of principals, all of whom were making their local opera debuts.
The Master Chorale of South Florida's performances of Elijah were scheduled before Joshua Habermann's appointment, but the new artistic director could hardly have asked for a more challenging assignment in his debut. Habermann opened the chorale's season with Mendelssohn's epic oratorio Friday night at First Presbyterian Church in Pompano Beach.
On a fall evening of rehearsals in Vienna, Valery Gergiev, music director of the Kirov Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre, a St. Petersburg institution making its Miami debut this week, is contemplating, with the rest of the world, the prospect of hard times.
Born in Beijing in 1987, Yuja Wang began studying the piano at age 6, performing in China, Australia and Germany as a child before attending the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. She moved to North America, first attending the summer program of the Mount Royal College in Calgary and then the Mount Royal Conservatory. At 15, Wang won the Aspen Music Festival's concerto competition and moved to Philadelphia to study with Graffman at the Curtis Institute of Music.
Mixing high and low, folk and fine art sounds appealing -- bring the energy and empathy of pop culture to the depth and formal beauty of classicism. And Vallenato Sinfonica, the union of popular vallenato act Jorge Celedón and Jimmy Zambrano with a classical ensemble, presented Friday night at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, sounded like a particularly intriguing version of this mix.
Patrick Dupré Quigley has been performing music for as long as he can remember: in church, hymns lent gravitas to the ritual of Catholic mass; in school, piano lessons and choir practice filled his afternoons; on road trips to visit his grandparents as a child, songs made the hours pass quickly.
Poor Butterfly. After the opera failed miserably at its La Scala premiere on Feb. 17, 1904, Puccini made extensive revisions which tightened things up considerably, and the work reemerged with great success when it was performed a few months later at Brescia.
The SoBe Music Institute's performance had its awkward moments, but what do you expect from a 3-year-old?
Deborah Voigt is back, in black. The American soprano has returned to the Royal Opera House stage four years after the company fired her for being too big for the little black dress chosen for the title character in Richard Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos. The decision sparked a fierce debate about weight discrimination in opera.
Seraphic Fire's luminous, scrupulously refined vocalism in classical repertoire is so well-known a commodity that one is constantly taken aback by the group's ability to tackle populist genres that seem light years removed from its home ground.
With the instrument's inherent qualities of elegance and nostalgia, a flute recital is perfect summer fare and just the thing to banish the miseries de la humaine.
Seraphic Fire will present a special summer encore run of its popular Amazing Grace program, performed last November and now available on the choir's self-produced CD. The program traces the celebrated hymn through a variety of American music from rural Appalachia and country to the folk, bluegrass and gospel traditions.
Gaping voids remain on the local music scene, but the inexorably expanding season is an encouraging sign. Not too long ago, Miami's classical season was over by April, and here we are in June with major artists still appearing.
The Mainly Mozart Festival will turn mostly Mendelssohn this Sunday with an offbeat program featuring half of the Amernet String Quartet. Amernet violinist Marcia Littley Arias and cellist Javier Arias will team up with pianist José Lopez for Mozart's Piano Trio in B flat K. 502, Hummel's Piano Trio in G major, Felix Mendelssohn's Piano Trio in C Minor and two excerpts from Fanny Mendelssohn's The Year. Performance time is 4:30 p.m. Sunday at the Westin Colonnade Hotel, 180 Aragon...
with Miami City Ballet The Cleveland Orchestra's 2009 Miami season will launch a three-year partnership with Miami City Ballet in addition to its concerts at the Arsht Center for the Performing Arts.
Orchestra Miami's 2008 concerts have put the emphasis on guest artists to spark ticket sales rather than showcasing the fledgling ensemble in its own right.
Sunday Afternoons of Music's 2008-2009 season will serve up a varied lineup of chamber, vocal and instrumental recitals. Violinist Elmar Oliveira will open the season on Sept. 7, followed by a genre-crossing program of classical and jazz on Sept. 28 with the Bergonzi String Quartet and pianist Shelton Berg, dean of the University of Miami's Frost School of Music.
Orchestra Miami will close its short season at 8 p.m. Saturday with a significant local premiere featuring Angel Romero. The acclaimed Spanish musician returns as soloist in David Chesky's Guitar Concerto, a work that fuses Latin elements, including flamenco, within a traditional classical style. Conductor Elaine Rinaldi will also lead the orchestra in Mozart's Overture to The Abduction from the Seraglio, Rodrigo's Three Traditional Dance Airs and Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony. At the University...
The young company showed it has arrived with its staging of Donizetti's `Lucia di Lammermoor.'
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