Royalists take note. There’s a musical unfolding this week at the Benedum Center that’s sure to warm the cockles of your heart. Musical theater lovers may also want to take notice. One of the most densely packed series of singable and lovable songs by Frederick Loewe (or perhaps anyone else) you’ll ever find is getting the royal treatment from a well-honed orchestra of 27 and some of the most gorgeous voices that have crossed the Benedum stage this past six months, operas perhaps excepted. Camelot. The word veritably rings with romance, intrigue, idealistic aspirations, villainy, humor, betrayal in a narrative that’s part legend, part fable, part fairy tale and pure magic. Adam Kantor as King Arthur and John L. Grimsley as King Pellinore Credit: Matt Polk The curtain rises on a young King Arthur apprehensive about the thought of his impending arranged marriage and hiding behind a tree. He’s called out by his teacher, the wizard Merlin, who lives his life backwards from th...
Composer Lera Auerbach Taking a Bow with Maestro Honek after a Performance of Her "Frozen Dreams" The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra closed out its 2024-2025 classical music season today (Sunday, June 15) with three works that could hardly be more dissimilar. The first, a commissioned work titled “Frozen Dreams” is by Russian-born Lera Auerbach. A “reimagining” of her earlier “Frozen Dreams” for string quartet, this expansion into an orchestral landscape calls for a number of unique percussive items and opens with the scraping of two friction mallets (used in sound healing practices) across a tam-tam to produce “otherworldly sounds.” In the program booklet, Auerbach s quoted as saying “Though the title “Frozen Dreams” suggests stasis, this work is, at its core, about movement – about the delicate tension between what is remembered and what is forgotten, between what is possible and what...