In Sunday’s (3/6) New York Times, Nicholas Kenyon writes, “In recent decades the early-music movement has provoked a radical shift in performance styles throughout much of the music world. … During the coming weeks, in a sort of serendipitous festival, [New York] plays host to some of today’s outstanding early-music ensembles and conductors and puts forward a leading period-instrument ensemble of its own being nurtured at the Juilliard School, Juilliard415. … William Christie, the American harpsichordist and conductor long resident in France, whose dazzling ensemble, Les Arts Florissants (some three decades old), presents music by Rameau at Alice Tully Hall on Friday and Saturday evening, has played a major role in the development of a historical performance program at the Juilliard School, now in its second year. … The very term ‘early music,’ which originally denoted a repertory (pre-Classical, later pre-Romantic) and the instruments appropriate to it, has come to stand more broadly for a performance aesthetic, an approach to music in the context of its time that has been carried into 19th- and even 20th-century repertory.”
Posted March 7, 2011
