Tag: Vol. 35 No. 3

I first heard violinist Nikolaj Znaider live in 2003, when he performed Schoenberg’s concerto with the CSO under the baton of Daniel Barenboim. He was incredible. He made this difficult work, with all its technical challenges, graspable, playing with great emotion, musicality, and an intensity and purity of tone that made for an exceptional balance […]

With a recurring role on Law & Order and regular bookings in east-coast regional theaters, Carmen Roman doesn’t turn up in Chicago much these days. But she’s returned for what may be the performance of a lifetime in Tennessee Williams’s tragic swoon Orpheus Descending. Roman plays Lady Torrance, an Italian immigrant stuck in a loveless […]

It’s an event when this Australian trio puts out a new album these days; after all, the members live on three different continents, and violinist Warren Ellis–a true guitar hero without a guitar–has actually been more prolific over the last half decade as a member of the Bad Seeds. Cinder (Touch and Go), their first […]

There’s no doubting the technical virtuosity of Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, but his taste is often another matter. At his best, as on 2001’s Supernova (Blue Note), he can combine the complex cross-cutting rhythms of his homeland with a nonpareil harmonic sophistication, and he’s a skilled improviser. But on his most recent album, 2004’s Paseo […]

Pianist McCoy Tyner turns 67 in a couple of months, and you’d think time would have taken its toll on the sheer physicality of his playing: barreling sonic booms from the left hand, stippled knife-edge melody lines from the right, and karate-chop chords from both. Despite the almost unnerving delicacy that also plays a vital […]

Writing in the New York Times, Dave Kehr called Bruce Posner’s 19-hour box set Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941 “one of the major monuments of the DVD medium.” Yet one peculiarity of this medium is that its monuments are easily overlooked, and this 174-minute program, part of a touring series that also stops […]

Twin Cinema (Matador) is easily the least immediate album that Vancouver’s New Pornographers have made–nothing on it leaps out and grabs you like, say, “Letter From an Occupant” or “All for Swinging You Around.” But the record has abundant pleasures for anybody willing to spend time with it. On 2003’s Electric Version, the band began […]

Not many women who grew up in nice big colonial houses in the Boston burbs can get away with presenting fictionalized personal crises as musical entertainment. But Amanda Palmer, singer and keyboardist for the gothy, uberdramatic duo the DRESDEN DOLLS, spins her tales with such punch and skill it’s hard not to give her a […]