Laraine Stephens News
American actress
- United States of America
- actor, television actor, film actor, opera singer
Last update
2024-04-20
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All the conducting master class
2023-05-11 02:25:08
Orchestra Director – Stephens Middle School Review of materials will begin immediately.Position will remain open until filled. Stephens Middle School Orchestra Salem-Keizer Public Schools (Salem, OR) seeks an outstanding colleague to join the music team at Stephens Middle School and lead the Stephens Orchestra program as well as teach elementary strings. Responsibilities: Provide artistic and instructional […]
2022-10-13 10:42:00
Review of Hallé concert with Tami Pohjola, conducted by Taavi Oramo
Violinist Tami Pohjola and conductor Taavi Oramo pictured with the Hallé (credit Tom Stephens)This week’s repeated Hallé programme (I heard it on Wednesday afternoon) was an intriguing one. Not so much for the headline works – Mendelssohn’s Italian symphony and Sibelius’ Violin Concerto – but for the two overtures by women composers added to those, and the two guest artists. They were both Finnish and young, and going places. The conductor was Taavi Oramo and the soloist Tami Pohjola. She is a wonderful player. She has both a gorgeously lyrical sound and some very big tone, allied with formidable technique. Standing against around 50 strings in the tutti orchestra was no problem, and the first movement cadenza was not just confidently negotiated but heartfelt in style. That makes a difference: the slow movement, too, was soulful in spades, and the finale much more than a mere fireworks display. Oramo ensured that the […]
2022-05-11 06:36:37
Samuel Barber: The Complete Songs, Dylan Perez & friends survey nearly 50 years of the composer's songs including those unpublished during his lifetime
[…] across Barber's compositional life from the mid 1920s (when he was in his teens) right through to 1972. In his style, he steered a steady and confident course, avoiding the fashionable modernisms that threaded their way through the 20th century but also avoiding the more jazz-inspired writing of his American contemporaries. These are well-made, striking songs with a highly intelligent response to text. And his selection of texts were wide with authors including James Stephens, A.E.Housman, James Joyce, Gerald Manley Hopkins, W.B.Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke (in French), Robert Graves, Matthew Arnold and of course the many anonymous texts in the Hermit Songs, and he even created a song out of a slice of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. Perhaps the composer that Barber most resembled, when it came to his intelligent approach to texts, was Benjamin Britten. Bass William Thomas brings admirable firmness to Three Songs, Op.2, moving them away from the neo-folk idiom that […]
2021-10-18 10:28:03
American song weekend at the Oxford Lieder Festival with Katie Bray, Nadine Benjamin, Kitty Whately, and Neil Balfour
[…] and Richard Rogers. We began with Neil Balfour, who is Indian-Scottish and trained at the Royal Northern College of Music and the National Opera Studio. He sang one of Aaron Copland's Old American Songs, 'The Boatman's Dance', with a lovely focused bass-baritone voice and characterful stage presence, and there were delightfully unexpected off-stage contributions from Kitty Whately. We moved on to Samuel Barber next, with a selection of his songs. Bessie Bobtail (words by James Stephens) was Balfour in a more serious mood, showing a strong commitment to the song supported by Anna Tilbrook's wonderfully evocative piano creating a slightly unnerving effect. Then Kitty Whately sang three more Barber songs, Sleep Now (words by James Joyce) was vibrant and touching, but veering on the intense, whilst Sure on this shining night (words by James Age) contrasted the lyric beauty of Whately's vocal line with the complexities of the piano part. Finally […]
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