Harold Duckett

The moment soprano Zulimar Lopez-Hernandez walked through the door at Knoxville Opera's offices where rehearsals are underway for KO's production of Charles Gounod's "Romeo and Juliette," it's clear that director Brian Salesky's near pitch-perfect sense for terrific young singers is ...

There is a story about a friend of Beethoven finding him in bed, nowhere near a piano, composing the trombone part for his oratorio "Christ on the Mount of Olives." Legendary pianist Arthur Rubinstein was said to be able to ...

The Doric String Quartet, one of the best of the world's young classical quartets, is coming to the Pollard Auditorium in Oak Ridge at 8 p.m., Friday, Jan. 6, to play a benefit concert for the Tuesday Morning Music Club's ...

If there are two works that are the landmarks of the cello repertoire, it's Johann Sebastian Bach's "Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello" and Antonin Dvorak's "Concerto in B Minor for Cello and Orchestra," Op 104.

When cellist Ildar Khuziakhmetov sits down to play Haydn's "Concerto and Orchestra in D Major," HOB VII:2, with the Knoxville Symphony Chamber Orchestra Sunday afternoon, Nov. 6, it will be like meeting an old friend.

It's been three years since soprano Joyce El-Khoury sang the role of Violetta Valery, the Parisian courtesan who is the title character in Guiseppi Verdi's 1853 "La Traviata." But she'll have the chance again on Oct. 28 and 30 when ...

It's nothing new for violinist Ittai Shapira to be playing brand new music at a symphony concert.

Pianist Alon Goldstein brought the soul of a poet and the gracefulness of ballerina to Ludwig van Beethoven's "Concerto No. 3 in C Minor for Piano and Orchestra," Op. 37, when he joined the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra for the KSO's ...

For pianist Joel Fan, playing music is about storytelling.

There's a watershed moment in Meredith Willson's "The Music Man," playing at Clarence Brown Theatre through May 15, that transforms it from, perhaps, the best musical theater piece ever created to a work of insight into social psychology.

Going from the brutality of hell to heaven in the course of a single concert isn't an easy feat to accomplish gracefully.

Going from the brutality of hell to heaven in the course of a single concert isn’t an easy feat to accomplish gracefully. But Thursday night at the Tennessee Theatre, the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra and pianist Jeffery Beigel did precisely that ...

One can almost forget that Italian composer Vincenzo Bellini's 1834 "I Puritani," which Knoxville Opera is presenting at the Tennessee Theatre this Rossini Festival weekend, is a stodgy set piece, or that tenor Yeghishe Manucharyan, as cavalier and Stuart loyalist ...

For Knoxville Symphony Orchestra music director and conductor Lucas Richman, the performances of Ludwig van Beethoven's "Symphony No. 9 in D Minor" Op. 125, which the KSO, joined by the Knoxville Choral Society, will perform Thursday and Friday, April 14 ...

There's British royalty, both real and purely ceremonial, around the fringes of the operas being presented during this year's Rossini Festival.

It takes most of Hippolyte's opening monologue to adjust to the complexities of the reverse social panopticon of the Rupert Murdoch-esque see-all, tell-all environment that director Klaus van der Berg and set designer Elizabeth Stadstad have orchestrated for the Clarence ...

Viewed from above, the change from “blending in” to “standing out” is just a fine line. But seen head on, the outstanding is elevated above everything else.

During the five years since Knoxville Symphony Orchestra Music Director Emeritus Kirk Trevor was last in Knoxville, his career has taken him around the world.

In Romanian historian and philosopher Mircea Eliade's paradigms of the sacred and the profane, the world is divided into those things that are sacred and those things that are not.

Chopin’s piano concerts, long criticized as little more than a solo piano with a little-used orchestral back-up band, manage to stay in the mainstream of piano concertos because of the sheer force of the piano writing alone. That is, until ...

In Jerusalem in the 1970s, learning to play an instrument was just something everyone did.

The lives of women in early 18th century France were seldom open to public display. So when Antoine Francois Prevost created Manon Lescaut in his 1731 novel "L'Histoire du chavalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut," it created such a ...

Renowned violin virtuoso Midori joined the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra at the Tennessee Theatre Thursday night for a rather introverted performance of Felix Mendelssohn’s 1845 “Concerto in E Minor for Violin and Orchestra,” Op. 64.

Trying to understand just who Midori Goto is and what makes her tick proved to be no easy task. A Google search turns up virtually nothing about the internationally acclaimed violinist, who will perform with the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra on ...

The Knoxville Symphony Orchestra celebrated its 75th anniversary at the Tennessee Theatre Thursday night. The celebration was just nine days shy of commemorating the first concert on Nov. 24, 1935. The celebration was complete with a giant cake and balloons, ...

For an actor who has built a career playing strong, mostly hard women, native Knoxvillian Dale Dickey has mixed feelings about performing in front of people she knows when she narrates local composer James Carlson's "Off Trail in the Smokies," ...

It isn't really fair to call Nemorino a dimwit.

Of all of the George Gershwin music that seems to be woven into the fabric of many people's lives, it isn't likely that most of it was presented with the clean precision and sheer joy with which the Knoxville Symphony ...

Somewhere between the dirt and grime that enshrouds society's bottom crust and the occupants of the rungs above them, one finds the roots of social theater like German playwright Georg Buchner's 1836 unfinished drama "Woyzeck," currently playing in a powerful ...

Cannon booms, like the ones that rattled the Tennessee Theatre during the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra's season-opening concert performance of Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" on Thursday night, probably haven't been heard downtown since the Civil War.

Accurate history and good theater have never been dependent on each other. Shakespeare certainly knew that a little bit of history could make marvelous theater, as do most politicians the reverse.

For the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra's season finale at the Tennessee Theatre Thursday night, music director Lucas Richman's well-programmed concert moved from the quiet children's storytelling in Maurice Ravel's "Mother Goose Suite for Orchestra," written as a piano four-hands piece for ...

Violinist Rachel Lee and composer Sergei Prokofiev are matched up for the finale of this season's Knoxville Symphony Orchestra concerts on Thursday and Friday, May 20 and 21, at the Tennessee Theatre.

Johnny Schicchi is a redneck liar, cheat and scoundrel in the University of Tennessee Opera Theater's contemporary Las Vegas Mafia-connected family setting of Giacomo Puccini's one-act opera "Gianni Schicchi" about Don Buoso Donati, whose relatives cannot wait for the family ...

Was that Lucy Ricardo playing Dr. Bartolo in Knoxville Opera's Rossini Festival production of Gioaccino Rossini's "The Barber of Seville" at the Tennessee Theatre?

Separating a justified dreamer from just a fool is the soul of a poet in director Paul Barnes' brilliantly conceived version of "Man of La Mancha" which opened to a captivated audience at the University of Tennessee's Clarence Brown Theatre ...

The 29-year-old Robert Schumann wrote in 1839 that symphonies being written during his day, with the exception of Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique," were little more than pale imitations of Beethoven's symphonies.

When lyric tenor Andrew Skoog joins soprano Jennifer Barnett, mezzo-soprano Jorraine DeSimone and bass-baritone Andrew Wentzel as the soloists for the Knoxville Choral Society and the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra's performance of Mozart's "Requiem," KV 626, this week at the Tennessee ...

One doesn't usually think of Rachmaninoff's music as deeply introspective, with its often lush melodies, glistening pianism and sometimes technical gymnastics, but the way young American pianist Adam Golka played Rachmaninoff's "Piano Concerto No. 3 in D Minor," Op. 30, ...

Like the multi-armed Hindu Kali, goddess of eternal energy, the Terry Riley Quartet, which played a Big Ears performance at the Bijou Theatre Friday night, seemed to have hands in minimalism, jazz and Indian ragas.

One doesn’t usually think of Rachmaninoff’s music as deeply introspective, with its often lush melodies, glistening pianism and sometimes technical gymnastics, but the way young American pianist Adam Golka played Rachmaninoff’s “Piano Concerto No. 3 in D Minor,” Op. 30, ...

Try to find American pianist Adam Golka on a day off and you may find him, as I did, walking around in a Philadelphia neighborhood looking for the house where the great Rudolph Serkin once lived.

Satirizing a satire can be risky business, especially when the original is about social mores mostly abandoned and faded from general consciousness, such as Gilbert and Sullivan's "Pirates of Penzance," which Knoxville Opera is staging at the Tennessee Theatre this ...

Native Knoxvillian and veteran actor David Keith didn't go looking for an opera to sing in, especially not one like Knoxville Opera's upcoming production of Gilbert and Sullivan's "Pirates of Penzance."

Writing incidental music for a play is one thing. Shaping a play to fit a piece of music is quite another.

If there is one thing coloratura soprano Rachele Gilmore would like you to know about her, it's that she is not an overnight success. All the fuss, of course, is over Gilmore's spectacular, unscheduled debut as Olympia in Offenbach's "Les ...

From the roars of "brava" and the standing ovation the moment the music stopped at the Tennessee Theatre Friday night, one might have thought it was an opera and the audience was rewarding a gorgeous soprano aria at the end ...

The prospect of a heavy-metal headbanger going after Brahms' 1878 "Violin Concerto in D Major," Op. 77 sounds like a wild ride along the lines of Emerson Lake and Palmer's 1971 rock reincarnation of Modest Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition." ...

After 24 years, Mark Zelmanovich is stepping down as the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra's concertmaster.

The last thing anyone needs this Christmas season is a Scrooge. At least, not the kind of curmudgeonly grinch who can suck the joy out of the most inescapably happy.