Violist Ettore Causa performs sonatas with pianist Boris Berman Sunday afternoon in the Shalin Liu Performance Center, part of Rockport Music’s classical season series.
Leonore Overture has been quiet for months, but let’s change that. I’ll adopt my old weekly routine, and say something about everything I hear, before or after, with posts on Tuesday. This past summer was light in output but lovely, with music in Rockport, Portsmouth, Tanglewood, and elsewhere. Moving forward, Leonore Overture certainly will become a more personal enterprise without regular outlets, and it’s harder to judge what kind of approach to take. I’ll try to find a new one, interesting.
This weekend offers lots of performance choices, and I’m hearing the BSO’s program with conductor Xian Zhang and pianist Jonathan Biss, and a sonata recital at Rockport Music with violist Ettore Causa and pianist Boris Berman. I’m sorry to miss Michael Lewin’s Seully recital, billed as his only Boston appearance, and Sunday’s Emmanuel Music concert, for string quartet and voice, with compositions by Price, Ruehr, Saariaho, others. Sandbox Percussion with jugglers at the ICA looks like fun too.
Longtime Boston Globe music critic Richard Dyer died in September, at 82. Dyer retired in 2006 after four decades at the Globe, his tenure at the paper coinciding with Seiji Ozawa’s directorship at the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Dyer did much for musicians and organizations in greater Boston, apart from his front-and-center work at Symphony Hall. His Sunday musical happenings column was a must-read, and was subsequently imitated. Vocal groups especially benefited from his attention. Dyer was quick on his feet, almost infuriatingly facile at his craft; I never saw him take a single note in concert. Friends told me he would blab away while filing late reviews in the Globe newsroom. I rarely disagreed with him.
Dyer’s friends and true contemporaries—Lloyd Schwartz, Ellen Pfeifer, Tim Page, others—have written more personal remembrances. The Globe took the best part of a week to run Dyer’s obituary—sad business from the newspaper that for decades counted on Dyer to file on edition. But Brian Marquand’s comprehensive appreciation did hit the mark.
Dyer and I weren’t friends, but certainly overlapped. By the time I started at the Herald as a freelancer, Dyer had covered music in Boston for decades, so we weren’t really colleagues either. Like everyone else working in Boston at the time, I followed Dyer’s lead, intentionally or not. He covered Boston’s dynamic music institutions with insightful and prolific energy, commenting on major events and conservatory offerings with the equal consideration.