Music

Yes, it’s another ballet, and we’re listening to the suite. Deal with it. The Firebird (1910) was Stravinsky’s first commission for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes — and his breakthrough. He was twenty-seven. The ballet draws on Russian folklore: the Firebird, a magical creature of light, helps Prince Ivan defeat the immortal demon Kashchei by revealing the secret of his deathless soul. Stravinsky’s teacher was Rimsky-Korsakov, and it shows in the brilliant orchestration and Russian folk material woven in with care. But it already goes further than anything Rimsky-Korsakov wrote. The Infernal Dance is violent in a way that points directly toward what came next: Petrushka in 1911, then The Rite of Spring in 1913 — until he finally blew up the concert hall. ...

There is a recent documentary on Perlman that is worth watching for one reason in particular: the discussion of color and vibrato. Perlman describes vibrato not as an ornament or a habit but as a palette — different speeds and widths produce different colors, and a violinist who only has one vibrato is like a painter with one brush. A narrow, slow vibrato pulls the sound inward and dark. A wide, fast one opens it up. The choice is not decorative; it is the interpretation. ...

The CSO’s 90th summer residency at Ravinia closes with an all-Tchaikovsky evening — cannons, a soloist finding her footing, and a conductor who once applied here as a cellist.

The Cinderella story long predates Disney — Charles Perrault wrote it in 1697, the Brothers Grimm in 1812, and Rossini turned it into an opera (La Cenerentola) in 1817. Prokofiev was commissioned by the Bolshoi to compose the ballet, and worked on it between 1940 and 1944, through the war years, in something close to exile from the international career he’d built before returning to the Soviet Union. The score premiered at the Bolshoi in 1945. It’s one of the great ballet scores — genuinely romantic in the waltz themes, genuinely funny in the stepsisters (Prokofiev, like Saint-Saëns and Shostakovich, had a taste for musical caricature), and genuinely terrifying in the midnight scene, where the clock strikes twelve and the harmony collapses under Cinderella’s feet. ...

Saint-Saëns wrote three violin concertos, but only the Third (Op. 61, 1880) is taken seriously, and even that is rarely programmed. What survives in the active repertoire are the two shorter showpieces: the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso (Op. 28, 1863) and the Havanaise (Op. 83, 1887). Both were written for Pablo de Sarasate, the Spanish violin virtuoso who had a way of inspiring composers to write things that sounded brilliant and felt effortless — then turned out to be extremely difficult. ...

Saint-Saëns (1835–1921) is one of the strangest cases of posthumous reputation in classical music. He was, in his lifetime, considered one of the finest musical minds in France — a child prodigy who reportedly offered at his debut to play any of Beethoven’s 32 sonatas from memory as an encore, a composer of five piano concertos, three symphonies, thirteen operas, and the Organ Symphony. By any reasonable measure, he was on track to be remembered alongside Beethoven and Brahms — a name in the permanent canon, a bust in the conservatory hallway. ...

Saint-Saëns’ Ascanio premiered at the Paris Opéra in March 1890 — a grand opera in five acts set at the court of François I, following the Florentine sculptor Benvenuto Cellini and his apprentice Ascanio through courtly intrigue, a king’s possessive mistress, and a girl hidden in a reliquary to escape a forced marriage. The opera is rarely staged today. What survives in regular repertoire are the ballet movements Saint-Saëns later transcribed for flute and piano. ...

The Goldbergs end where they began — the Aria returns verbatim after thirty variations. In the 1981 Gould, the returning Aria sounds lonelier than the opening one. It seems nothing changed. You did.

Schiff is the thinking pianist’s pianist — no showmanship, every phrase deliberate. His 2017 live recording at the Pierre Boulez Saal is the Goldbergs given back to Bach: legato, transparent, unmannered.

Radu Lupu (1945–2022) was famously reclusive — few recordings, almost no interviews, a public career conducted as if publicity were a mild embarrassment. He won the Leeds, the Van Cliburn, and the George Enescu competitions in the late 1960s and then largely refused to behave like someone who had. At the keyboard he never pushed a phrase toward you. His recording of Schubert’s final piano sonata, D.960 — the opening movement’s long, suspended melody arrives without urgency, as if he simply found it there and decided not to disturb it. ...