Having gorged ourselves on Birthday cake for Johann Sebastian Bach’s 336th and enjoyed a boatload of streamings from Leipzig, it is time to jump in and enjoy what Knoxville’s spring has in store this week. • • • …
Review: KSO Lures Its Live Audience Back With A Special “Symphonic Split”
BY ALAN SHERROD Apparently, the universe loves irony. That can be the only explanation for the wildly successful return on Sunday of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra to performances before live audiences. In a novel approach to conforming to pandemic…
KSO Resumes Concert Schedule for Limited Live Audiences at Tennessee and Bijou Theatres
BY ALAN SHERROD Beginning this weekend, music-deprived audiences of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra will once again be able to attend live performances in downtown’s Tennessee and Bijou Theatres—albeit on a limited seating basis. Following a painful year of public…
KSO Music Director Aram Demirjian Receives The 2020 Sir Georg Solti Conducting Award
BY ALAN SHERROD In its twentieth year of assisting young conductors on the threshold of substantial careers, the Solti Foundation U.S. has announced that the 2020 recipient of The Sir Georg Solti Conducting Award is Knoxville Symphony Orchestra music…
Review: Violinist Hristova Commands the Price – KSO Fashions an Heroic ‘Eroica’
BY ALAN SHERROD The lobby of the Tennessee Theatre has probably seen every kind of audience response, but the intermission buzz at this weekend’s Knoxville Symphony Orchestra Masterworks concerts was a little more animated than usual. Even amidst the…
Review: KSO Delivers a Memorable “Mozart and Mahler”
By Alan Sherrod Mah•ler•i•an noun – an admirer of the Austrian composer and conductor Gustav Mahler, or his work In a preface to the orchestra’s performance of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 (“Titan”) this weekend, Knoxville Symphony Orchestra maestro…
Review: Virtuosic Percussion and a Sublime Beethoven Seventh Mark KSO’s “Beethoven and the Art of Rhythm”
By Alan Sherrod While double bass players might argue to the contrary, it is an orchestral fact that percussionists—generally relegated to the back corner of the concert stage and, yet, responsible for a virtually infinite diversity of sounds—receive the…
Review in Brief: Timeless Tales Mark KSO’s “Peter and the Wolf” Chamber Classics
By Alan Sherrod All four of the works on Sunday afternoon’s Chamber Classics Series concert by the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra came from the tonal side of the 20th Century, but each of the works seem to possess an ineffable…
Review: Natasha Paremski and KSO Find a Show-Stopper in Grieg’s Piano Concerto
By Alan Sherrod There is both an art and a logic to the program arrangement of concerts, a fact that this weekend’s Knoxville Symphony Orchestra Masterworks audience apparently appreciated. While symphonies are generally saved for the end due to…
Review: KSO Opens Its Chamber Classics Series With Layers, Conversation, and Honey
By Alan Sherrod Perhaps it is the unseasonably warm weather that persists—although we’ve survived warm, dry autumns before. Still, things feel a bit different in Knoxville’s classical music scene this fall. First, it was the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra’s opening…