Planet Carlos
Rave Review: Symphony in Waves
Symphony in Waves, Carlos Kalmar’s newest CD with his Grant Park Orchestra on the indie Cedille Records label, has earned a glowing review (along with perfect scores of 10 for both artistic quality and sound quality and “Disc of the Month” honors for October) from writer David Hurwitz on the ClassicsToday.com web site.
The disc, featuring works of contemporary American composer Aaron Jay Kernis, includes the premiere recording of his 1996 composition “Too Hot Toccata.” Hurwitz likens it to the “pop music-spiced pieces, such as New Era Dance, that alerted the concert-going public to Kernis' arrival as a bright new talent” and calls it “a bubbly showpiece, with plenty of virtuoso licks for individual members of the orchestra.”
His summary judgment: “Contemporary orchestral music recordings don't get much better than this.”
Portland audiences will get to hear Kalmar conduct “Too Hot Toccata” live for the first time later this month at the Nov. 15-17 Classical series concerts. On the same program: Pink Martini founder Thomas Lauderdale, a classically trained pianist, performs George Gershwin’s jazzy-bluesy Concerto in F, as well as the first-ever Oregon Symphony performance of Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 3. Tickets: orsymphony.org.
Is There Really Only One Carlos?
Concertgoers in PDX sure haven’t lacked opportunities to catch Carlos Kalmar on the podium this fall, what with him conducting not only the first three Classical series concerts of the season but the premiere Inside the Score concert and October’s one-night-only performance with Lang Lang as well.
Somehow, he also found time in his datebook to launch his new monthly radio show on All Classical FM (details at allclassical.org) and do an on-air stint to open the station’s fall membership drive. He even managed to catch Portland Opera’s production of La Traviata in what might loosely be called his “spare” time. Whew.
But that’s not to say Portland had Kalmar all to itself this fall – not by a long shot. In between all those local gigs, our music director jetted off to Finland for two performances with the Lahti Symphony Oct. 8-9 and, then, to Texas for three performances with the Dallas Symphony Oct. 23-25.
After he’s done leading the Oregon Symphony once again early this month, we won’t see Kalmar until he returns for the all-Tchiakovsky program with pianist Stephen Hough Dec. 6-8. But like the Energizer bunny, he just keeps going and going: first to Vienna for some well-earned family time, then to Kuala Lumpur, where he’ll conduct two consecutive weekends of concerts with the Malaysian Philharmonic in mid-November.
