Sonic Art Events Plentiful During ArtBasel – Knight Foundation

Sonic Art Events Plentiful During ArtBasel

Cellist Alban Gerhardt.

Seems like all anyone wants to do these days is talk about Art, as in ArtBasel. But if you’re more inclined to the sonic arts, this is a good week for classical music-making here in South Florida.

Here are six events that make that point:

Haydn and Brahms: One of the better-known conductors in the United States is in town this week — Osmo Vänskä currently leads the Minnesota Orchestra, but the Finnish musician leads the New World Symphony on Friday and Saturday in the final symphony of Brahms (No. 4 in E minor). It’s a powerful, gripping work, and the orchestra also will perform an early work of Stravinsky, his Song of the Nightingale, taken from his 1914 opera The Nightingale. The German cellist Alban Gerhardt also is on hand as soloist in the D major Cello Concerto of Franz Joseph Haydn. The Lincoln Theatre concerts are at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

Music of the movies: Eduardo Marturet leads his reenergized Miami Symphony Orchestra in two concerts devoted to film music. The concert publicity calls for music by Mozart, Mahler, Nino Rota, John Williams and Tchaikovsky, but the Quicktime promo on the MISO blog features the fanfare from Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra, the 18th variation from Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, and two Williams scores: Superman and Star Wars. In any case, it’s a good chance to hear music used in the movies, which often proves to be the magic element that makes the drama really work. Concerts are set for 8 p.m. Saturday at the University of Miami’s Gusman Hall and 8 p.m. Sunday at the Lincoln Theatre.

Song of the season: James Judd appeared last month in the Family Fest concert at the Knight Concert Hall, leading the Miami-Dade High School Honors Orchestra as artistic chief of the Miami Music Project. This week he returns to the wider stages of the region for the first time since 2001 in three performances of the complete Messiah of George Frideric Handel. Joined by four Curtis Institute soloists, the Master Chorale of South Florida and the Boca Raton Symphonia, Judd will lead the Baroque masterwork at 8 p.m. Friday in Miami’s Trinity Cathedral, 8 p.m. Saturday at Spanish River Church in Boca Raton, and 2:30 p.m. Sunday at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts.

FM-autonomous-sounds

Frozen Music: The South Beach Institute of the Arts, which is in the middle of revamping the Little Theater on its Washington Avenue campus, offers a sneak peek of the renovation work Thursday and Friday night in advance of the theater’s reopening next year. Joining them will be the Subtropics group’s Frozen Music Ensemble, featuring David Dunn, which will present two new works: Autonomous Sounds I and II. The events are set for 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. Thursday and Friday.

Quartet expands: The Delray String Quartet leaves its Palm Beach County home for the first time in its six-year history, inaugurating a regular series of concerts in Miami-Dade and Broward counties. Friday night, the quartet offers music by Beethoven and Cesar Franck (his F minor Piano Quintet, joined by pianist Tao Lin) at St. Thomas Episcopal in Coral Gables and follows that Saturday night with the same program at All Saints Episcopal in Fort Lauderdale. Concerts begin at 7:30 p.m. Friday and 8 p.m. Saturday.

Two more FGO nights: While the Florida Grand Opera’s season-opening production of Pagliacci and Suor Angelica has concluded in Miami, you can still catch this double bill featuring the American soprano Kelly Kaduce in two performances at the Broward Center in Fort Lauderdale. Kaduce plays two women who meet sad ends to the accompaniment of fevered late Romantic Italian music; in Pagliacci she is stabbed to death, and in Angelica she poisons herself. Shocking stuff, but audiences love it. The double bill bows at 8 p.m. Wednesday and Friday.

So there really is a lot of stuff going on outside ArtBasel, and this might be a good week to catch some of it.