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Currently Principal Conductor of the Bonn Opera in Germany, Jacques Lacombe keeps his hand in the orchestral scene in North America when he leads the Boston Symphony February 15-17 in a subscription week at Symphony Hall – an all-French program (Debussy/Ravel) with Jean-Yves Thibaudet. Also in February, he returns for concerts with the Montreal Symphony — where he has led well over a hundred concerts — in a program of Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5 and Shostakovich’s Violin Cto. No. 2, featuring violinist Alina Ibragimova. At season’s end, he leads the Quebec Symphony in Brahms’ German Requiem.

On the opera front in 2017/18, Lacombe leads Carmen, Il Tabarro/Gianni Schicchi and Oberst Charbert in Bonn; Hoffmann in Monte Carlo with Juan Diego Flores and Olga Peretyatko, Faust at the Deutsche Oper Berlin (Diana Damrau’s debut in the role of Marguerite), Tosca at the Calgary Opera and Turandot in Vancouver.

Rounding out the picture, in the last several seasons European Opera houses have seen Lacombe lead productions of:

Bonn
Holofernes
La Boheme
Lucia
Peter Grimes
Tosca
Carmen

Deutsche Oper Berlin
Pelleas and Melisande
Der Traumgörge
Flying Dutchman
Ariadne Auf Naxos
Eugene Onegin
Un Ballo in Maschera
Faust
Samson and Delilah

L’Opera de Monte Carlo
La Favorite (w/ J.D. Flores)
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
Opera Gala w/ Diana Damrau

Nantes/Anger: Dialogues des Carmélites

Opéra National du Rhin: La Juive

L’Orchestre National de France/Paris: Werther w/ J.D. Flores and Joyce DiDonato

“On the orchestral front, an augmented Vancouver Opera orchestra revelled in the score’s sinister brilliance and conductor Jacques Lacombe was in his element.” – David Gordon Duke, Vancouver Sun, October 15, 2017

“Lacombe proved a skilled and zealous advocate for this music’s poundingly atavistic rhythms and its fanciful lyric scenes.” – Jeremy Eichler, Boston Globe, July 11, 2016

Adam Golka releases SCHUMANN: Piano Sonata No. 1, Op. 11 etc with First Hand Records. For more information, click here.

“These are performances of poetry and sensitivity, with the reading of the piano sonata rivalling some of the great discs of the past. Adam Golka is joined by the soprano Lauren Eberwein, an artist of subtle skill, on An Anna II, and a particularly delicate reading is given of all the music here, which is perhaps not as familiar as it should be.” [Classical CD Choice]

Adam Golka piano
Lauren Eberwein soprano*

Robert SCHUMANN (1810-1856)
1. An Anna II *
2-6. Piano Sonata No. 1 in F sharp minor, Op. 11, ‘Grosse Sonate’
7. Fantasiestücke, Op. 12, No. 1, Des Abends: Sehr innig und spielend
8. 6 Gedichte und Requiem, Op. 90, No. 6, Der schwere Abend*
9. 12 Klavierstucke, Op. 85, No. 12, Abendlied (arr. Adam Golka)

Recorded at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York City, USA, 24-30 October 2016

On February 2, Marc-André Hamelin looks forward to the release of Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring & Other Works for Two Pianos Four-Hands.

Recorded with Leif Ove Andsnes for Hyperion, the new album is the first to capture on disc the collaboration that has, in live performance, been variously hailed as “a keyboard partnership of titans” (The Times of London) and “a meeting of two champions at the top of their game” (Washington Post).

Click here to hear an excerpt from their performance of The Rite of Spring at Carnegie Hall earlier this year. A “mini-taster” preview video for the album is available here.

Next week, conductor Ken-David Masur leads the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, and a cast of actors in a new staged adaptation of Edvard Grieg’s incidental music to Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt on October 19, 20, 21, & 24 directed by Bill Barclay, and featuring soprano Camilla Tilling. Extremely popular and well-known in the context of the two concert suites Grieg constructed later, this music is rarely heard in its original, complete form. (Its last complete BSO performances were led by Mr. Masur’s father, Kurt Masur, in 1985.) To open the program, Mr. Masur leads the orchestra in Beethoven’s incidental music to Egmont.

Ken-David Masur at Hollywood Bowl

Masur recently led the L.A. Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl in a program featuring Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, and a new production of Moto Osada’s chamber opera Four Nights of Dream at the Japan Society in New York and at the Tokyo Bunka Kaikan, stopping to record with the Stavanger Symphony in Norway en route. He looks forward to joining the Portland (ME) Symphony to lead them in Brahms’ Symphony No. 1 and Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with Ran Dank. Ken-David Masur begins this season with the Boston Symphony with the new title of Associate Conductor.

After the New Year, Ken returns to the Munich Symphony and the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo, and finishes up the season with weeks at the Colorado and Milwaukee Symphonies, the Rhode Island Philharmonic, and the Chicago Civic Orchestra.

Conductor Jayce Ogren leads subscription weeks this season with the Columbus, Edmonton, Louisville and Asheville Symphonies in straight-ahead classical repertoire ranging from Mendelssohn and Beethoven to Sibelius, Stravinsky, and Copland – all dear familiars and important pillars of his repertoire.

But right now – he is in Australia leading the Melbourne Symphony and chorus with film – Terence Malick’s The Voyage of Time at the Melbourne Festival – a Wordless Orchestra project, with whom he recently led Jackie at National Sawdust. (He also leads film projects with the Dallas Symphony and the Hong Kong Philharmonic.) Other “Specials” include subscription concerts with the Nashville Symphony and guest artist Amos Lee, and a return to the Indianapolis Symphony for a Happy Hour concert featuring Time for Three in a program with works by Ranaan Meyer, Beethoven, and John Adams.

JACKIE screening with live scoring. Photo by Jill Steinberg

Outside the box – Jayce opened the season with his Orchestra 2001 at the Philly Fringe Festival last month in a performance of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ 8 Songs for a Mad King, musicians in masks and Jayce in costume for this semi-staged version, and he closes out the season with 2001 in the Philadelphia premiere of the complete Yellow Shark by Frank Zappa.

In between are concerts with Orchestra 2001 of Steven Mackey’s Slide, the title referring to visual slides. Projections of images will be choreographed with the music to explore how we interpret imagery. Jayce and the orchestra will be playing the supporting cast – acting and narrating the work as they play, with performances at the Venice Island Center in Philadelphia, the Sound Kitchen in Princeton, and National Sawdust in Brooklyn

Marc-André Hamelin recently completed his week at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, where he participated in the Jury.  Hamelin evaluated competitors on his own composition, commissioned specially for the competition, in addition to several other challenging pieces.  Here are some of his thoughts on being a juror and composer for the competition this year:

Composer Marc-André Hamelin Discusses His Commissioned Piece For The Cliburn

Clef Notes: Do You Love Or Hate The Commissioned Piece?

Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto and Chopin’s Piano Cto. No. 1 figured into Adam Golka’s winter season, with performances with the Riverside County Phil. in CA and the Knoxville Symphony, respectively: “Golka’s playing was light and full of the energy of the youthful Chopin, who was 20 and in love when he wrote it. Golka’s lovely playing of the second movement “Romance. Larghetto,” captured Chopin’s expressions of his devotion to the young soprano Konstancja Gladkowske.” – Harold Duckett, Knozville New Sentinel, April 21, 2017

A highlight of spring was a return to the International Musicians Seminar Prussia Cove (overseen by Artistic Director Steven Isserlis) where he played and coached solo works and chamber music with an array of eminent colleagues and teachers.  Returning home to New York in late April, he was presented by the MEF in a recital at Alice Tully Hall where the theme of “Franz Liszt, Holy and Infernal Genius” included Adam’s performance of Legend No. 1 and Mephisto Waltz No. 1, plus “Reminiscences of Don Juan” for two pianos with Orion Weiss, and Three Petrarch Sonnets with mezzo-soprano Lauren Eberwein.

June 3 sees Adam reprise his “Van Cliburn: American Hero” program of Beethoven and Chopin, this time as a featured presentation of the 2017 Cliburn International Piano Competition.  He returns to Fort Worth and Bass Hall at the end of August for a performance of Mozart’s Cto. No. 27, K. 595 in the Fort Worth Symphony’s Classical Masters Festival with frequent collaborator Miguel Harth-Bedoya.  In between, he returns to the Krzyzowa Festival in Poland – a bastion of extraordinary chamber music playing and cross-cultural exchange of ideas — and heads West for a summer adventure at the new Tippett Rise Art Center in the Beartooth Mountains of Montana, where he performs a recital ofSchubert, Liszt, and Brahms followed by an evening of chamber music with the Ariel String Quartet.