The 2021 inaugural edition of the Bayfront Jazz Festival takes place in Miami’s Bayfront Park. The festival’s mission is to honor and celebrate the current and future giants of Jazz, Afro-Cuban, Latin and electronic music. This year’s unique line-up includes Mark Guiliana’s Beat Music, Roy Ayers, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Chucho Valdés and Gonzalo Rubalcaba & Aymée Nuviola. Mark Guiliana is an acclaimed drummer, composer, educator, producer and founder of Beat Music Productions; through which, he will release both My Life Starts Now and Beat Music: The Los Angeles Improvisations as a bandleader later this year.
Roy Ayers at Bayfront Jazz Festival
The 2021 inaugural edition of the Bayfront Jazz Festival takes place in Miami’s Bayfront Park. The festival’s mission is to honor and celebrate the current and future giants of Jazz, Afro-Cuban, Latin and electronic music. This year’s unique line-up includes Roy Ayers, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Chucho Valdés, Gonzalo Rubalcaba & Aymée Nuviola and Mark Guiliana’s Beat Music. One of the most visible and winning vibraphonists since the 1960s and part of the Bay Front Festival 2021 is Roy Ayers. Ayers’ 1976 neo-soul album Everybody Loves the Sunshine is one of the most heavily sampled records in hip-hop history.
Dee Dee Bridgewater at Bayfront Jazz Festival
The 2021 inaugural edition of the Bayfront Jazz Festival takes place in Miami’s Bayfront Park. The festival’s mission is to honor and celebrate the current and future giants of Jazz, Afro-Cuban, Latin and electronic music. This year’s unique line-up includes Dee Dee Bridgewater, Roy Ayers, Chucho Valdés, Gonzalo Rubalcaba & Aymée Nuviola and Mark Guiliana’s Beat Music. Dee Dee Bridgewater is a daring performer of great depth whose singing talents have earned her three Grammy Awards as well as a Tony Award. At Bay Front Jazz Festival, she performed together with “The Memphis Soulphony”.
Magic Moments of Music – Jessye Norman and Kathleen Battle “Spirituals”
When Jessye Norman and Kathleen Battle took the stage of Carnegie Hall March 18, 1990 a breath of history wafted through America‘s most famous concert hall. It is a camera view of the audience that makes clear how long the road to this moment in music history was: there, the now very old African-American opera singer Marian Anderson, one of the great voices of her generation. In 1939, she had been barred from singing in Constitution Hall, because she was black. The twelve-year-old Jessye Norman had absorbed Anderson‘s biography, just like the music she performed that evening together with her great colleague and competitor Kathleen Battle: Spirituals. That evening in March 1990 was under enormous pressure of expectation and the tension crackled at all corners. For one thing: Would the two compete? Where did the competition lie? Divas who would actually manage to sing together and not against each other? But the two divas take Carnegie Hall by storm; critics and audiences alike pay homage to them: It is a musical feast of charisma, virtuosity, liveliness and show. Jessye Norman dominates the stage with her authentic timbre and an African colourful costume, Kathleen Battle still hits the finest high coloraturas.
Carnival of the Animals – A music piece tells the story
The “Carnival of the Animals” is his best known work. Camille Saint-Saëns never wanted to publish it during his lifetime. On the 100th anniversary of the composer’s death in December 2021, the music piece itself tells us how the dwindling act of birth occurred in the composer’s mind. It is the notes that tell us of its suffering and of its triumph on the great stages of the musical world. According to the will of its creator, “Carnival of the Animals” was to be performed only once, in March 1886, on Shrove Tuesday. And now this piece has stolen the show from Camille Saint-Saëns’ other works for a hundred years. Directors have brought Saint-Saëns’ music to Hollywood. At the Cannes International Film Festival, “The Aquarium” is the signature tune. The film shows that “Carnival” is more than the musical characterization and exaggeration of various species. The role of the narrator was taken over by German actor Sebastian Koch. An orchestra specially assembled for the film lets the music of the “Carnival of the Animals” resound.
RCO: Järvi conducts Mozart & Schumann
Víkingur Ólafsson is making his debut with the Concertgebouworkest. Over the past few years, he has attracted attention with his interpretation of music by Bach, Glass and contemporary music. That’s why it’s certainly be interesting to hear his interpretation of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24, a work of unrivalled beauty anticipating the romantic era with its dramatic opening and its dark undercurrents. Paavo Järvi has made several impressive guest appearances with the Concertgebouworkest. He now shines his light on Schumann’s Third Symphony (‘Rhenish’), the culmination of Schumann’s efforts to prove himself as an orchestral composer. Inspired by the beautiful landscape of the Rhineland, he wanted this symphony to sound like folk music. But the work also sometimes has a solemn, spiritual intensity, the result of the deep impression that the then newly built Cologne Cathedral made on him. PROGRAM Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 24; Schumann: Symphony No.3
St John Passion
After performances in recent years of Bach’s liturgical cantatas and St Matthew Passion, John Eliot Gardiner and the Monteverdi ensembles turn to the composer’s other great meditation on the suffering and crucifixion of Jesus. Martin Luther described the Gospel of John as ‘unique in loveliness and, in truth, the principal Gospel, far superior to the other three and much to be preferred’; Bach responded to the text with music which is by turns evocative, stirring, exultant and profoundly moving – music that holds our attention from beginning to end. The Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists are joined by a dynamic cast of exciting soloists to bring the story of the passion to life. “This is a St John Passion that no music lover should miss.” The Times
Le Concert de Paris 2021
It is now a well-established tradition: every year, on July 14, the Orchestre National de France welcomes the summer with a large musical gathering at the foot of the Eiffel Tower with stunning fireworks. Conducted by Simone Young, and accompanied by the Chorus of Radio France, the orchestra invites the audience around the world, to experience great arias and famous concert pieces in the company of prestigious soloists like Pretty Yende, Piotr Beczala, Renaud Capuçon, Ksenija Sidorova, Clementine Margaine, and Ibrahim Maalouf!
Simon Boccanegra
Intrigue, family tragedies, power struggles – these words aptly describe Giuseppe Verdi’s opera “Simon Boccanegra”. And the opera is somehow frighteningly topical: in this piece with only one female role, the men write history and the women are the victims. The world premiere flopped, but almost 25 years later the opera received thunderous applause at a new performance in Milan’s La Scala. Andreas Homoki has staged this second and revised version at the Zurich Opera House. Its premiere was one of the last conducted by outgoing music director Fabio Luisi and Christian Gerhaher’s much-lauded role debut as Simon Boccanegra.
Krystian Zimerman – Beethoven Piano Concertos
Krystian Zimerman and Sir Simon Rattle have reunited to record Beethoven’s Complete Piano Concertos with the London Symphony Orchestra in one marathon concert. From the youthful first to the mighty ‘Emperor’, this is a real one-off: an unprecedented meeting of great musical minds. That’s no exaggeration: the unique rapport between Zimerman and Sir Simon is based upon years of shared ideals and mutual respect. Gramophone described their partnership as “a thing of wonder”, praising their “thrilling sense of purpose”. Crucially, neither of them ever forgets that Beethoven is bigger than both of them, making this unprecedented, unrepeatable concert a worthy tribute to Beethoven at the end of this, his 250th anniversary year.