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Women in Music
There were two highlights for me in WOMEN IN MUSIC, billed as “a musical conversation between the United States and Spain” by way of Shakespeare and Cervantes inspired works composed and performed by women, one of solo piano, the other a suite of vocals. The first was Consuelo Díez’s Ser y tiempo (2011), a piano…
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Festitango 2017
June 20-25 was my third time at the Festival International de Tango Medellín, a festival I like for its musical programming, its focus (in the city of Gardel’s death) on singers, and the window it opens on the city’s tango culture, which values professional distinction and amateur achievement in equal measure. There are competitions for…
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Tania Stavreva
My first sight and sound of Tania Stavreva was at a tribute to the Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera in his centennial year. The Bulgarian-born pianist opened the concert, to great effect, with two Ginastera pieces and one, “Bulgarian Prelude” (2016), that she had written in his honor. I noticed afterward, following her career, that she…
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Pablo Estigarribia
The Argentine pianist Pablo Estigarribia balanced his concert last week, at Mezzrow in New York, on a tripod of genres. Trained, at first, in classical, he came, at age twenty or so, to tango, a course that he has followed for the past decade. He has studied and played with top tango figures and found…
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Alberto Ginastera
Alberto Ginastera was born on April 11, 1916, and it was a hundred years later, on April 11, 2016, that the Spectrum Symphony presented a centennial commemoration of the Argentine composer at the Broadway Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. The wide-ranging and innovative concert wasn’t limited to works and performances by Ginastera or other artists with…
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The Tango Fado Project
Manhattan Camerata will deliver again, this time with flowers, THE TANGO FADO PROJECT to (le) poisson rouge for, albeit a day late (on Presidents Day), a “Valentine’s Concert.” This is not a gimmick: the heart of the camerata is, in its own words, “a couple in love who were invited to participate by another couple…
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Postales
I knew from seeing her a year ago that Karina Beorlegui can be streetwise and a little punky. Now I know that she can be supremely elegant. I knew that she could be tart and witty and clever. Now I know that she can be lush and suave and cosmopolitan. I knew that she was…
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Tango for Import
TANGO FOR IMPORT is, as a tango album, remarkably literate. The liner notes by Adam Tully are, to begin with, unusually astute, capturing the arterial flow of a long tradition. The CD ranges from early 20th century tangos to two of his own compositions, which could, on a casual listen, have been composed decades ago.…
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Sofia Ribeiro
Hearing the Portuguese jazz singer Sofia Ribeiro last weekend at Cornelia Street Café was, for me, a real discovery. She is, to begin with, wonderful in front of an audience, good-naturedly self-effacing, bouyant and open in a way that wends its way through her personality and into her music. The most wistful and reflective of…
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Origin of Adjustable Things
It was by whim and circumstance that I found myself, on Tuesday night, at SubCulture for the CD release of THE ORIGIN OF ADJUSTABLE THINGS, by the singer Joanna Wallfisch and the pianist Dan Tepfer. The strange poetry of the title belies the eccentricity of how it came to Wallfisch while water skiing on a…