David Noel Edwards is a writer, composer, and recording artist from Canaan, New York. He has been writing for the Berkshire Edge since 2015, mainly about music, but also about books, birds, and reptiles.
Under Steiner's leadership, the concert series had in three decades established a reputation for engaging the crème de la crème of chamber musicians from all parts of the globe.
Hearing Eric Whitacre's music for the first time is a wondrous and immense pleasure. So if you love choral music, then you owe it to yourself to hear Whitacre's works performed in a great room by a great choir.
"We're going to announce a new initiative for screenwriters, directors, and music supervisors…which will give people a chance to participate." — David Friedman
No one should be surprised that the "Magnificat" contains some of the happiest music Bach ever wrote. The first minute of it, alone, is like a bubbling happiness tonic.
You know you're not in church anymore when you hear the soloist sing, "If I cannot, three times a day … drink my little cup of coffee, in my anguish I will turn into a shriveled-up roast goat."
"We were completely gassed! Barber has studied our charts and has written some of our favorite effects. The piece is very hard, but so far it sounds just beautiful to us."
"It all started when my friend Herb gave me an old score of a piece of music I was very familiar with called "Cavatine for trombone and piano" by Camile Saint-Saëns." — Ronald Barron, retired Principal Trombonist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra
If you're going to hold a concert performance to benefit new works by living composers, why not hire a musician who knows how to compose music on the fly? How about finding a composer-pianist who plays his own improvised cadenzas in Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue"?
"To bridge ethnic, political, generational, and religious division, and transcend the arbitrary boundaries that separate us from each other." — John Myers
In addition to these headliners, the festival offers a jazz prodigy concert, a swing dance, a jam session, and, one of its signature events, the annual Jazz Crawl.
Sunday's program consists of four works composed at various times in Mozart’s career. Their difficulty for modern violinists suggests that Wolfgang was more than a decent string player, in addition to having a reputation for showing off.
