The New Criterion: Ending the Palm Beach season
The Palm Beach Symphony closed out its forty-seventh season on May 22 with a concert of Ravel and Brahms featuring the Georgian piano soloist Alexander Toradze. Steeped in the international Romantic tradition, Toradze approached Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major, part of the composer’s foray into multi-movement orchestral works, with a sparkling combination of wit and grace, ending the introductory Allegramente movement with a raised hand and faux-serious inquiry to the audience, “Was it any good?”
The New Criterion: Symphony by the sea
The coalescence of art, capital, and wise public health policies that is rapidly transforming South Florida into an international cultural hub has received a great boost this spring from the Palm Beach Symphony. The orchestra’s dynamic maestro, Gerard Schwarz, has led it to new heights and placed it among the ranks of the very best American regional ensembles (an ascendancy that was sorely needed following the closing of the Florida Philharmonic in 2003). The longtime director of the Seattle Symphony and New York’s Mostly Mozart Festival, Schwarz moved to Florida in 2019 to become Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music and the director of the Frost Symphony, before assuming his post as the Palm Beach Symphony’s musical and artistic director last season.
The New Criterion: Taking the Baton
Gerard Schwarz may have had this joke in mind when, as he reveals in his lucid autobiography, he was asked how to become a conductor. “It’s simple,” he answered, “by being a great musician.”