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Above: violinist Danbi Um

Author: Kevin DallaSanta

Saturday July 11th, 2026 – The dog days of summer, from July to mid-August, are an ancient conception, originating in the rising stars of Canis Major, the “Great Dog” constellation. It is fitting, then, that the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center hosts a Summer Evenings series featuring rising stars of the classical world. Billed as the “summer’s hottest ticket,” the series helps to bridge the long gap between spring and fall seasons, a stretch where many patrons have retreated to summer homes, and musicians to alpine festivals.

The concert of July 11th featured six musicians in four chamber works: Mozart’s Piano Trio No. 4, Ravel’s Violin Sonata, Gershwin’s Three Preludes (arranged for violin and piano), and Dvorak’s Piano Quintet No 1. The program gave the impression of a recital, with varied musicians and varied repertoire, and no special pretense of thematic unity. 

If anything, thematic unity arose from the juxtaposition of the Ravel Violin Sonata and Gershwin’s Three Preludes, two jazz-influenced works by composers who both died in 1937. Both pieces were played by violinist Danbi Um, accompanied by pianist Wu Han, who is Co-Artistic Director of the Society.

Ravel’s Violin Sonata is a pinnacle of the repertoire and a challenge for both violinist and pianist.  (The sonata is sometimes labeled his second; as his first was published posthumously.) Played well, the first movement has a transcendental effect, with the opening bars sweeping the audience away into an otherworldly landscape. High registers in both instruments sparkle like icicles in the winter sun; and open fifths, evoking medieval churches, echo the Dies Irae—the famous melody of the requiem mass. Ravel’s brilliant scoring seems to meld the violin and piano into one instrument.

The second movement, labeled “Blues,” most clearly reflects the composer’s fascination with jazz, incorporating major sevenths, dotted rhythms, and portamentos. Yet the work is not pastiche, but wholly Ravel, and grounds itself in classical form. Violinists thus have a wide range of interpretive pathways; Um chose technical finesse and a lyrical tone, which highlighted the beauty, melancholy, and strangeness of the composer’s harmonies.

After the ferociously difficult finale—a perpetuum mobile—the Gershwin Preludes were essentially an encore for the pair. While in New York City, the composer wrote the work for solo piano, and Heifetz arranged it for accompanied violin. Um and Han played with verve, and the audience seemed appreciative of the technical bravura. Like the defunct Mostly Mozart summer festival, Summer Evenings skew towards the traditional, but evidently a bit of jazz is a licit thrill. 

The first work in the program, Mozart’s Fourth Piano Trio, is noted for its unusual choice of key (E-major); and indeed the key appears to be the most distinctive feature of the work. Melodies and form are standard for the composer, and the cello part, excellently played by Sterling Elliott, was too often relegated to a continuo role. As one audience member loudly remarked between movements: “that was pretty”.

In the first three works of the program, and particularly in the Mozart, the balance suffered from an overly loud piano. The decision to raise the lid fully, rather than partially, depends on venue, repertoire, and instrumentalists; but a fully raised lid often drowns out string players. The loud piano was more successful in the Dvorak, which had a greater number string players for balance, and was scored in more of an orchestral style.

Dvorak’s first quintet, less frequently performed than his second, was written prior to the composer’s tenure in New York City and concomitant enthusiasm for “American” music. As such, the quintet reflects Czech idioms of a young composer whose fame had not yet spread beyond Prague. The work features the piano in nearly a concerto role, with the string quartet generally working in unison. Dvorak’s writing is lush and thickly scored, with grand finales in the first and final movements. Czech elements appear most prominently in unexpected harmonic transitions and the boisterous 6/8 rhythms of the final movement.

The composer was yet to achieve fame in Vienna, and later in America, but a youthful optimism shines through his early works. So too was the mood onstage, and the group of players had an average age not far from the composer’s. In the summer drought of classical music, this chamber concert was a welcome draught: and with optimism their stars are ascendant. 

~ Kevin DallaSanta

Above: Gaetano Dionizetti

This classic film of Donizetti’s LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR has been “enhanced” and re-posted on YouTube. The great voices of Renata Scotto, Carlo Bergonzi, Mario Zanasi, and Plinio Clabassi are heard at the peak of their powers. Bruno Bartoletti conducts.

Watch and listen here.

A beautifully sung – and played! – recital by bass-baritone Tom Krause (above) and pianist Irwin Gage, given at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam on June 12, 1977.

Watch and listen here.

Marc Chagall’s only opera production opened at the New Met in 1967. The artist had also created the two giant murals that hover over the house’s lobby.

In December 1972, there was a broadcast of the production, a recording of which has recently surfaced. It boasts a cast full of wonderful singers whose performances at The Met I remember vividly.

Listen here.

CAST:

Pamina: Adriana Maliponte; Tamino: Stuart Burrows; Queen of the Night: Edda Moser; Sarastro: Hans Sotin; Papageno: John Reardon; Papagena: Loretta Di Franco; Monostatos: Paul Franke; Speaker: Donald Gramm; First Lady: Mary Ellen Pracht; Second Lady: Shirley Love; Third Lady: Nedda Casei; Genii: William Newman/Baron Fitz-Gerald/Robert Fitz-Gerald; Priests: Nico Castel and Russell Christopher; Guards: Rod MacWherter and Louis Sgarro

Conductor: Peter Maag

All of these names are so dear to me; it’s especially lovely to have an Italian Pamina!

~ Oberon

In the bleak days of the pandemic, the players of the Milwaukee Symphony sent out a gift to the world: Elgar’s Nimrod.

Now that the bleak days are with us again, we need great music more than ever.

Listen here.

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In 1956, soprano Anita Cerquetti gave two aria recitals on Italian radio. These were preserved, and for a while they were available on CD, packaged in red velvet boxes. Recently, these recordings turned up on YouTube, and they are thrilling to hear. 

The Cerquetti story is not a happy one; in 2014, Christopher Purdy wrote about her all-too-brief career on his blog:

https://christophercpurdy.blogspot.com/2014/10/anita-cerquetti-introduction-and.html

Listen to the two concerts here.

In the year between the first concert and the second, the voice sadly began to show signs of decline, though there is still much to enjoy in her singing in the December concert.

As a side note, in 1965 I met Maestro Ziino (conductor of the January concert) after he led a performance of TROVATORE at the Cincinnati Zoo Opera, starring Martina Arroyo and Irene Dalis. 

~ Oberon

One of my all-time favorite singers, Mignon Dunn (above, as Carmen), has passed away at the age of 98.

A Tennessee native, Ms. Dunn studied with Karin Branzell and (later) with Beverley Peck Johnson. She made her operatic debut in New Orleans as Carmen in 1955.

I started to hear Ms. Dunn in smaller roles on some of her first Metropolitan Opera weekly radio broadcasts back in the early 1960s. Even is these brief but important character roles, Mignon’s voice stood out. She even sang the Shepherd in TOSCA!

As time passed, her repertoire grew steadily, and soon she was singing Venus, Brangaene, Azucena, Amneris, Suzuki, the Princesse de Bouillon, Ulrica, Marina in BORIS GODUNOV, Dalila, Carmen, the Nurse in FRAU OHNE SCHATTEN, Herodias, Anna in LES TROYENS, Fricka, both La Cieca and Laura in LA GIOCONDA, Santuzza, Venus, and Kundry. One of her greatest triumphs came in 1977 as Ortrud in LOHENGRIN opposite Pilar Lorengar and Rene Kollo. I saw her in many of these roles, and met her at the stage door, where she was always most cordial.

While she sang at such prominent opera centers as Milan, Paris, London, Vienna, Moscow, Verona, and Buenos Aires, The Met was ever her home: she gave over 650 performances there between her debut as the Nurse in BORIS GODUNOV in 1958 and her farewell – as Klytemnestra – in 1994.

Mignon sings “Amour, viens aider ma faiblesse” from SAMSON & DALILA at a MET Marathon in 1975:

Listen to Mignon as the Nurse in the finale of Act II of Strauss’s FRAU OHNE SCHATTEN in Chicago in 1984. Marilyn Zschau is the Dyer’s Wife. Mignon’s final note brings down the house.

In addition to her many radio broadcasts, Mignon appeared in MET telecasts, most notably in an unforgettable ELEKTRA wherein she, Birgit Nilsson, Leonie Rysanek, and Maestro Levine basked in an endless ovation:

I hope the four of them are having a grand old time in Heaven.

~ Oberon

Tenor Benjamin Hulett sings “Waft her, angels, through the skies” from Handel’s JEPHTHA.

Listen here. 

Photo by Helena Cooke

The American coloratura soprano Erie Mills has passed away at the age of 73.

Illinois-born, Ms. Mills made her operatic debut in Prokofiev’s LOVE FOR THREE ORANGES at Chicago Lyric Opera in 1979. In 1986, she made a brilliant debut at New York City Opera as Cunegonde in Bernstein’s CANDIDE. This was followed by her Metropolitan Opera debut as Blonde in Mozart’s ABDUCTION FROM THE SERAGLIO in 1987. 

Ms. Mills sang with the English National Opera, at La Scala, the Vienna State Opera, San Francisco Opera, Hamburg, and Santa Fe. Her repertoire included Lucia di Lammermoor, Rosina, the Queen of the Night, Adina, Despina, and Juliette. She also maintained a busy concert and recital career. 

In later years, she taught at San Jose University and was artistic director of Livermore Valley Opera.

I had the great pleasure of hearing Ms. Mills on three occasions: as Morgana in Handel’s ALCINA (opposite Carol Vaness in the title-role) at New York City Opera in 1983; as Zerbinetta with Boston Lyric Opera in 1991 (opposite Deborah Voigt’s break-through Ariadne); and in Mozart’s APOLLO ET HYACINTHUS at the Mostly Mozart Festival in 1992. Her dazzling technique, ease in the highest range, and lively stage presence made her performances a joy.

Listen to Erie Mills singing Cunegonde’s “Glitter And Be Gay” here.

~ Oberon

Above performance photo by Nicholas V. Hall

~ Author: Lane Raffadini Rubin

Tuesday June 23rd, 2026 – The Orchestra of St. Luke’s wrapped up its annual Bach Festival in Zankel Hall on Tuesday with works by four members of the Bach family. Jean Rondeau, the world’s most remarkable harpsichordist, led a program largely drawn from his 2017 album Dynastie.

Rondeau waited forbearingly at the keyboard until the rustling in the hall subsided before gesturing the start of the first piece. Rondeau typically appears on stage and camera in a disheveled state (unshaven, with long unwashed hair and baggy T-shirts) but this moment of pause revealed the genuine, rarified conscientiousness that he brings to his playing despite his appearance.

The ten OSL string players who joined Rondeau were excellent partners in the evening’s musicmaking, constantly attuned to the shape of his melodic lines and his coaxings for bursts of energy.

The program began with Rondeau’s transcription of Johann Christoph Bach’s chorale Wer Gott vertraut, hat wohl gebaut. The strings provided a sedate, organlike backdrop over which Rondeau’s first entrance blossomed into technicolor.

After the music of Johann Christoph (Johann Sebastian’s older cousin), the remainder of the program traced a reverse-chronological path through Johann Sebastian’s sons (Johann Christian, the youngest, and Carl Philipp Emanuel, the second oldest) back to the definitive Bach at the center of this dynasty.

The evening’s highlight came early with Johann Christian’s Concerto No. 6 in F minor, in particular its moody and sublimely contoured second movement. Between statements of the ritornello the soloist is given searching, quasi-Romantic material akin to the journey of the orphic soloist in the second movement of Beethoven’s fourth piano concerto. At each return of the ritornello the OSL players brought a new character, from questioning to yearning to resolute.

Rondeau wove together the brilliant extended cadenza of the third movement with the Andante con tenerezza from Carl Philipp Emanuel’s Sonata in A-Major. It was a compelling programmatic trick, a bridge between the two half-brothers working across decades in different corners of Europe. The cadenza-sonata was characterized by harmonic richness and deceptive twists and turns. Rondeau’s playing was often lyrical and always technically flawless. He drew out a range of the froggy, lacey, and stately sounds that are the hallmark of his instrument.

Carl Philipp Emanuel’s Concerto in D-minor followed, revealing a composer caught between the idiom of his father and the nascent streamlined, classical textures of Haydn and Mozart. If Johann Christian’s concerto demonstrated brooding expressivity, Carl Philipp Emanuel’s showed elegance and propulsion.

The first movement of the latter concerto often relied on repetitive pulses and unison moments of arrival. Intervening sections of virtuosic passagework garnered audible hums of approval from the audience. The second movement, strikingly, featured many melodic traces of Johan Sebastian while the third movement revived Italianate pyrotechnic displays common in an earlier generation of concertos.

All the music thus far was performed without pause. In a charming moment, Rondeau began an improvisatory interlude which turned out to be no more than the tuning pitch for the OSL players.

The program concluded with Johann Sebastian’s Concerto in D- minor, BWV 1052, a very popular piece whose appeal I have never understood. But presenting it as a source for the remaining music on the program was a fascinating perspective that threw its spiky contrapuntal texture and dialogic relationship between soloist and orchestra into sharp focus.

The second movement presaged Johann Christian Bach’s and brought Beethoven’s orphic meanderings back to mind as well. Rondeau and the OSL players brought precise articulation and perfect lyric consensus to this movement’s underwordly melodic refrain.

Throughout the evening Rondeau showed a level of physical restraint that would come as a surprise to those who have watched the many production videos available online of his recording sessions, which can border on the wacky. Is he growing out of his wild-boy schtick? The hair and T-shirt suggest that we might find him during a moment of transition. But his playing, still filled with the kind of vibrant energy that tests the agility of the humble harpsichord, continues to mature and revealed itself tonight in the blazingly effective ways he was able to bring the OSL players along for the ride through multiple generations of Bach keyboard works.

~ Lane Raffaldini Rubin