Gregory Walz is a native of Bitburg, Germany and received a B.A. in History from the University of Utah. He has worked at the Utah Division of State History since 2004, in the joint Research Center with the Utah Division of State Archives in the historic Rio Grande depot. He enjoys music in almost all of its forms and genres.
The talent of young cellist Matthew Zalkind, who performed a recital on June 29 at Libby Gardner Concert Hall as part of the University of Utah School of Music’s eighth Summer Chamber Music Workshop, comes from equal parts nature and nurture. His father, Larry Zalkind, retired from his […]
Sinfonia Salt Lake, Salt Lake City’s newest professional chamber orchestra, gave its inaugural concert on January 25 and its second on May 16 at the First United Methodist Church in Salt Lake City. There is certainly a place for such an orchestra in the Salt Lake City area’s orchestral […]
The Utah Symphony’s return, after 50 years, to New York City’s famed Carnegie Hall on April 29 was one of the high points of the performing arts institution’s exceptional 75th anniversary season. They were last there in 1966, under the baton of Maurice Abravanel, to open Carnegie Hall’s […]
Swiss composer Frank Martin (1890-1974) is one of the most enigmatic composers in that nation’s musical pantheon. The integrity, rigor, and honesty of his music, in multiple genres, are perhaps unmatched, even in comparison to other exceptional 20th-century composers. Martin’s “Mass for Unaccompanied Double Choir” fits this template especially well. […]
The Utah Philharmonia is the largest orchestral ensemble of the University of Utah School of Music. Its most recent concert, given at Libby Gardner Concert Hall in Salt Lake City on February 11, presented the ensemble at one of its peaks. With an enthusiasm second to none, the School of […]
Chamber music, at least in some circles, has a reputation for being difficult to embrace with warmth and then thoroughly enjoy, but those that do tend to become lifelong aficionados. There is often a stark intimacy and immediacy to this genre, and even more so to the string […]
Salt Lake City and its surrounding environs are gifted with a raft of talented classical music ensembles and long-standing concert series. 2015 was, as in recent years, filled with an array of choices for memorable performances. Many, if not most, of my comments will be gushingly positive, but […]
In three days, two of Utah’s premiere classical music organizations collaborated in Salt Lake City in a way that will continue on four additional weekends for the 2015-2016 concert season. Both entities premiered compositions by a living composer – one being a world premiere, and the other two Utah premieres. The now-venerable but lively […]
Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) was a masterful French composer, and is best known for his languidly vigorous and consoling choral Requiem — likely his most performed composition. His chamber music is exquisitely crafted, but this craft can at times conceal some of the intense emotional arcs that it harbors. It is […]
Style and passion, with remembrance—these attributes, when elegantly assembled, create a realm fit for a silver anniversary. For Utah Chamber Artists (UCA), its annual Collage concert at the Cathedral of the Madeleine can provide the bridge to such a needed domain. The expansive, golden-lit glow of the interior of the cathedral […]
Utah Symphony Recording, Mahler’s Symphony No.1 | Reference Recordings | Release Date: September 11, 2015 The Utah Symphony has a Mahler performance tradition, one that began when Maurice Abravanel became its third and most influential music director in 1947. This tradition helped to place the orchestra on the national and international map of major […]
Park City Beethoven Festival @ Park City Community Church. Park City, Utah, July 30, 2015. Concert review by Gregory Walz. The 2015 Park City Beethoven Festival, now in its thirty-first summer season, is Utah’s oldest classical music festival. Concerts are now given exclusively in Park City, in multiple venues, although […]
In a novel and effective move, each piece, and each movement in the case of the Brahms, was prefaced by a reading of lines of poetry, or lines from a play, or in the case of the Glinka, a narrative of a brief portion of the composer’s life in the composer’s words. Three actors/actresses from Salt Lake Acting Company performed these readings. They were Olivia Custodio, Robert Scott Smith, and Alexis Baigue.
A dash of two rather obscure (mostly) twentieth-century Danish composers, mixed with the still most–prominent one, along with a peak from a young German composer’s early romanticism. What makes for a superb chamber music concert? The right performers for the repertoire and compelling performances of course.
This past Sunday, May 10, 2015 the Choir of the Cathedral of the Madeleine, with the Cathedral Chamber Orchestra, performed two choral compositions by composers acknowledged to have been masters of their craft. One, Mozart, was a musical genius, and the other, the Frenchman Charles Gounod, is a […]
Utah Symphony Associate Concertmaster Kathryn Eberle and Principal Symphony Keyboard Jason Hardink have been threading their way through all of German composer Ludwig van Beethoven’s ten violin sonatas since the fall of 2013. This is when Utah’s NOVA Chamber Music Series began its Gallery Series at Salt Lake City’s Art Barn. Now the Series has expanded to another small venue, Julie Nester Gallery in Park City. This most recent concert took place this past Thursday evening April 16, 2015.
The title promoted for the most recent Salt Lake City Symphony concert was “Fire & Ice!” The program: works by Jean Sibelius, Igor Stravinsky, and Ralph Vaughan Williams — a Finn, a Russian, and an Englishman. All the works were conducted by Robert Baldwin, an American. In the end, the fire was beholden to the luminous and transcendent ice.
