Joshua Roman: Game, Set, Cello

What a summer for pianist Joyce Yang! Her appearances at several top U.S. music festivals - including her Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival debut, as well as performances at Brevard (NC), Bravo! Vail Valley, and La Jolla Summerfest - garnered ovations from both critics and audiences. Reviewing Yang's performance with the Aspen Festival Orchestra and Jaap van Zweden, the Aspen Times wrote, "Yang provided a beautifully natural, pure performance of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3. ... She had the confidence to let the music be what it is without pushing or pulling on it."

As soloist with the Russian National Orchestra at Festival del Sole, "Joyce Yang, 25, brought the audience to its feet for her electrifying playing of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2," according to the Napa Valley Register. Yang's summer season ends with a return to the Hollywood Bowl and the Los Angeles Philharmonic (Sep 8). She continues her close collaboration with the Milwaukee Symphony this fall and will be back again in February for her ongoing Rachmaninoff cycle with Edo de Waart.

Selected fall highlights: 

• Sep 8: Hollywood Bowl - Los Angeles Philharmonic/ Bramwell Tovey (Saint-Saëns: Piano Concerto No. 2)
• Oct 11: Budapest; Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra/ Domonkos Héja (Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 2)
• Nov 9: Milwaukee Symphony/ Francesco Lecce-Chong

  (Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No. 1)

• Oct 24: CD release (Avie Records) Collage 

  (Scarlatti, Currier, Debussy, Liebermann, Schumann, Chopin/Liszt)  

• Nov 17: Eugene Symphony/Danail Rachev

  (Rachmaninoff: Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini) 

For more information, visit Joyce Yang's web site or the Arts Management Group web site.

Mezzo-soprano Kelley O'Connor arrived at JFK fresh from Scotland's Edinburgh Festival as New Yorkers battened down the hatches for Hurricane Irene. Her second scheduled performance of Mozart's Requiem with Louis Langrée and the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra was cancelled, but luckily Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times had been at the opening. He wrote, "The performance was graced by strong vocal soloists, including the plush mezzo-soprano Kelley O'Connor. ... The performance was rewarded with a standing ovation. People shouted bravos and took photos with cellphone cameras. Something about the approaching hurricane on the last night of the truncated festival seemed to make the audience especially grateful."

 MusicalCriticism.com raved about O'Connor's portrayal of Ravel's Shéhérazade in Edinburgh with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra: "In the role of fin-de-siècle Shéhérazade, Kelley O'Connor brings a stunningly beautiful presence: tall, lithe and pencil-slim, with an appealing voice, what one might call an Alice voice, neither rich nor thin, but somewhere just right in between. It matched Ravel's diaphanous score admirably."

Selected fall highlights: 

• Sep 10:  Cleveland Orchestra - Blossom Music Center/ Jahja Ling (Beethoven: Symphony No. 9)            
• Sep 16-17: St. Louis Symphony /David Robertson (Stravinsky: Les Noces)
• Oct 21, 23, 25:  Opera Boston/Gil Rose

  (Berlioz: Béatrice et Bénédict - Ursule)

• Nov 4, 17-19:  London & Baltimore symphonies/    Marin Alsop (Honegger: Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher - St. Catherine; Nov 19-Carnegie Hall)
• Dec. 6: Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center   (Bach Cantatas: BWV 12, 168, 163, and 72)  

For more information, visit KelleyO'Connor.com or the IMG Artists web site.  

For more information, visit JessicaRivera.com, her  YouTube channel or the IMG Artists web site.  

For more information, visit AlessioBax.com, his  YouTube channel or the Barrett Vantage Artists web site .    

Photos: Jeremy Sawatzky (Roman), Keith Lew (The Knights), Oh Seok Hoon (Yang), Zachary Maxwell Stertz (O'Connor), Isabel Pinto (Rivera), Lisa-Marie Mazzucco (Bax)