Latest news with #Sinfonia
Time of India
04-06-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Cooper Corporation begins export of EPA-compliant gas gensets to US and Japan
Cooper Corporation has announced the commencement of its full-scale export of gas-powered gensets to international markets, beginning with a bulk shipment to the United States. The company's 10 kVA and 25 kVA gas gensets, which are certified by the US Environmental Protection Agency ( EPA ), are being exported from India for the first time. The 25 kVA genset has received a favourable response from the US market, and the company plans to export gensets ranging from 5 kVA to 500 kVA, all compliant with EPA regulations. These gensets are currently the only Indian-made models in their category to hold EPA certification. In addition to the US, Cooper Corporation is also exporting V-Twin LPG 10 kVA gensets to Japan , in collaboration with Japanese partner Sinfonia. Domestic applications and historical background On the domestic front, Cooper Corporation's engines have been used by the Indian Defence Forces for over a decade, including during Operation Sindoor , where the products were noted for their reliability in difficult conditions. The company also entered the agricultural equipment segment with the launch of a 50 HP tractor in February 2025, which has generated interest in domestic markets. Farrokh N. Cooper , Chairman and MD, Cooper Corporation, stated, 'Today marks a historic and proud milestone for Cooper Corporation as we commence large-scale exports of EPA-certified gensets to the United States, a testament to our unwavering commitment to innovation, quality, and compliance with global environmental standards." As pioneers in the industry and the only Indian manufacturer of EPA-compliant 25 kVA gas gensets, we are proud to dispatch our first of many bulk shipments of 22 kW gensets to the US, while also expanding our global footprint with exports of V-Twin LPG 10 kVA gensets to Japan in partnership with Sinfonia,' Cooper added.
The Guardian
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Proms 2025 season offers plenty both to cherish and challenge
Even if it doesn't really seem like one, this year's Proms marks the beginning of a new era for what styles itself as the world's biggest classical music festival. Though Sam Jackson took over as controller of BBC Radio 3 and director of the Proms two years ago, the 2023 and 2024 programmes were essentially planned under the aegis of his predecessor as Proms supremo David Pickard. So the coming season is the first for which Jackson has been responsible, though he is keen to emphasise that organising a festival on the scale of the Proms is a team effort, and that though his name is the one that appears on the introduction to the printed guide, he is just one among several who have put the season together – a season of 72 concerts in the Royal Albert Hall, together with weekend residencies and concerts in Belfast, Bradford, Bristol, Gateshead and Sunderland. Certainly the alterations that have been made to the eight weeks of concerts so far seem more matters of subtle degree than radical shifts in emphasis. There have been fears that the changes that have already been inflicted on Radio 3 during Jackson's tenure might be mirrored in his first Proms. These include the tendency to play single movements rather than complete works, while avoiding any details such as opus and catalogue numbers that might be construed as off-puttingly musicological, as well as the launch of Radio 3 Unwind, devoted to music to 'restore calm'. Such worries are quickly allayed though by a glance at the programmes, which contain as much serious, challenging music, both old and new, as ever. And whether deliberate or not, the choice of repertoire and the artists performing it this year suggest that attempts to ensure that every politically correct box has been ticked seem far less strenuous and contrived than they sometimes have in previous years. Though there is no over-arching theme to the season, significant musical anniversaries are appropriately marked, with the exception perhaps of the 500th anniversary of Palestrina's birth. There's Arvo Pärt's 90th birthday, the 150th anniversaries of the births of Ravel and Samuel Coleridge Taylor, and the 50ths of the deaths of Bernard Herrmann and Shostakovich, while this year's two great centenarians, Pierre Boulez and Luciano Berio, are celebrated in a late-night visit by Ensemble intercontemporain, as well as in orchestral concerts. Though performances of Berio's famous Sinfonia, his Schubert-based Rendering, and the music-theatre piece Recital I (For Cathy) are welcome inclusions, it's a shame that a concert performance of one of his operas that has yet to be heard in Britain could not have been organised, and that one of Boulez's rarely heard early choral works could not be revived, especially in the wake of the BBC Symphony Orchestra's outstanding performance of Pli Selon Pli in the Barbican's Boulez day last month. As usual too the new works, the world or British premieres, vary from the genuinely intriguing to the seemingly dutiful. Tom Coult's Monologues for the Curious, inspired by the ghost stories of MR James and composed for tenor Allan Clayton, and Mark Simpson's ZEBRA, a guitar concerto for Sean Shibe, after the sci-fi of Philip K Dick, belong in the first category, as does Anna Thorvaldsdottir's cello concerto, Before We Fall, and Gabriella Smith's organ concerto, Breathing Forests. And while there aren't any standout special events – performances of works that only an organisation such as the BBC would have the financial and musical muscle to put on – it will good to hear Birtwistle's Earth Dances and Steve Reich's The Desert Music played live again, while British music aficionados won't want to miss three choral rarities, Vaughan Williams's Sancta Civitas, Arthur Bliss's Morning Heroes and Delius's Mass of Life. Transatlantic orchestras, however, are still conspicuous by their absence. The regular stream of visiting ensembles in previous years that represented the cream of the orchestral world in the final weeks of the season now seems very much a thing of the past. There are two concerts each from the Royal Concertgebouw under Klaus Mäkelä and the Vienna Philharmonic with Franz Welser-Möst, who is rarely seen in London these days, as well as a one-off appearance from the Leipzig Gewandhaus with Andris Nelsons. Other visitors include the Danish National Symphony, the Melbourne Symphony and the Budapest Festival orchestras, but as usual the majority of the concerts are sourced from the BBC's 'house' orchestras, and the independent home-based ones, some with their regular conductors and some with guests. As ever, tickets to stand, either in the arena or in the gallery under the dome of the RAH and which are only made available on the day of each concert remain a bargain, priced at £8 throughout the season. But elsewhere in the hall prices vary widely from evening to evening, though for most concerts the most expensive seats are around £60. Sometimes they're considerably more than that, though the logic behind some of the pricing is hard to follow. There's a top price of £110 for the second of the Vienna Philharmonic's concerts, for instance, a programme of Mozart and Tchaikovsky, while the previous evening, with the same orchestra and conductor performing Berg and Bruckner, the most you will pay is £86. No doubt the BBC and the Albert Hall have their reasons for these and other disparities, and meanwhile throughout the two months of concerts, you can always a get to hear lot of good music for a lot less. The Proms will run from 18 July to 13 September. General booking opens at 9am on 17 May.
The Guardian
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Britten Sinfonia/Berman review – haunting premiere about memories of the Holocaust
There is memory, but there is also 'post-memory'. Mingled with the recollection of our own life stories, we humans also carry those of others, told or sometimes concealed by those we once knew, or even never met. But what is passed down becomes ours too. This interwoven fabric of past, present and future is the rewarding inspiration behind Michael Zev Gordon's compelling and intelligent new concert piece, A Kind of Haunting. Gordon's substantial setting is for two narrators, baritone and string orchestra. Premiered by the Britten Sinfonia under Jonathan Berman, it proves true to its title. The score explores Gordon's search for his Polish Jewish ancestors, murdered in the Holocaust in 1941: an event of which Gordon's own father barely spoke, and which the composer and his own children now own too. The focus is on the haunting not just the horror. As Gordon says, the work explores the potency of the Holocaust's aftereffects – a gift and a curse, as Marianne Hirsch's narration has it. Gordon's music is deceptively fragmentary. It starts with a shard of lullaby which disappears and reappears without crystalising. Other patterns and phrases recur and rebuild. But the structure is always clear and controlled. There is a strong focus on text, suggesting Gordon does not want the music to become too overwhelming. Occasionally it feels a little too restrained for what is being described, but Gordon's artistic tact pays dividends in the final pages. One narrator, the excellent Allan Corduner, depicts the search. The second, Louisa Clein, reflects, equally convincingly, on the meaning of the interwoven memories. James Newby brings vocalism of great nuance and controlled solemnity to five reflective arias of mounting intensity to texts by the poet Jacqueline Saphra. The opening half of the concert brought two contrasting masterworks of the Holocaust era itself. Under Berman, the Sinfonia played Martinů's Concerto for double string orchestra, piano and timpani with full toned ferocity. One had to remind oneself that the concerto, with Huw Watkins a formidable piano soloist, was written in 1938, before the events it otherwise seems to embody so strongly. Strauss's Metamorphosen, premiered in 1946, is a work of an altogether different kind, with violinist Zoë Buyers leading the 23 string players in a performance whose intimacy captured the veteran composer's vast sense of loss. This concert will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 9 April The Britten Sinfonia: 1945: A Kind of Haunting is at Elgar Concert Hall, Birmingham on 26 March and Saffron Hall, Saffron Walden on 28 March
Chicago Tribune
07-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Review: Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen burrows into Bartók with the CSO
It's been too long since we've seen Esa-Pekka Salonen on the podium. The conductor-composer, a youthful 66, had to bail on his annual Chicago Symphony booking last season to receive the Polar Music Prize, one of Scandinavia's highest cultural honors. Based on the pointed cheers during his Jan. 30 and Feb. 6 concerts — Salonen routinely stays for a minimum of two concert cycles — he was much missed. One especially craves Salonen's out-of-the-box programming in these long CSO seasons between music directors, which, thus far, have felt creatively rudderless. To wit, Salonen brought two nights of assiduously played cornerstones by Béla Bartók: the Concerto for Orchestra and an immersive concert version of the one-act opera 'Bluebeard's Castle.' He also programmed a piece of his own, 2022's 'Sinfonia concertante for organ and orchestra'; Latvian organist Iveta Apkalna, one of the dedicatees, soloed. In a reversal of the usual fortunes at 220 S. Michigan, the two slam-dunk repertory pieces invited along for the ride — Richard Strauss's 'Don Juan' and Beethoven's Symphony No. 2 — came off workmanlike in comparison. Salonen's Sinfonia concertante, programmed for the Jan. 30 concert cycle, turns the organ's austere timbres futuristic, like an alien anthem. In written comments, Salonen says he intended for the piece to live up to its 'sinfonia concertante' title — in other words, the organ is on equal footing with the orchestra, not above and apart from it. That much is clear. The Sinfonia's best moments nail the handoff between organ and orchestra — Apkalna inheriting a line from the piccolo at the beginning, or locking in with the low brass on the pedalboard, the organ's foot-operated keyboard. At the very end, the organ hangs over the orchestra's final B-flat chord with a quiet D-flat-minorish chord, a sonority plucked from another world. Salonen's orchestra writing, however, isn't his best — it's often blocky and meandering. On Thursday, it wasn't played with much phrasing or zhuzh from the strings, either. The best part of his 'Sinfonia concertante for organ and orchestra' is, in fact, the organ. Salonen had apparently never composed for the instrument prior to the commission, and his exuberant writing brings us right into the sandbox with him. With any luck, we'll hear more from Apkalna, too. She ended with a pealing, cascading toccata on the chorale 'Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr,' composed by fellow countryman Aivars Kalējs. The curtain-closer let Apkalna settle into her lyrical side rather than the stacked dissonance of the Sinfonia's cadenzas, her wrists elegantly rolling and flowing between manuals. Hearing Salonen conduct his own work is always a pleasure, but Bartók was unequivocally the man of the hour for both concerts. On Jan. 30, a resplendent Concerto for Orchestra carried all the DNA of the CSO's long relationship with the piece — the 1955 Reiner recording helped usher it into the repertoire — and embraced a dramatic pacing that eluded the Strauss. One can't heap praise on this performance without shouting out specific members of the orchestra — it's right there in the 'concerto' title. Stefán Ragnar Höskuldsson's flute solos were always passionately phrased, as was oboist William Welter's aubade-like solo in the first movement. Even sections that have seen some fitful performance in recent months sounded sterling, trombones led commandingly by Michael Mulcahy and horn solis sounding well-blended and clarion. Salonen's 'Bluebeard' on Feb. 6 managed to raise the bar still higher. Tasteful lighting design by Keith Parham plopped us right into the heart of Bartók's disturbing tale: Judith marries the reclusive duke Bluebeard, only to find out his castle — and he, by extension — is cursed. Against Bluebeard's pleas, she finds successive horrors and splendors behind seven doors. At the opera's climax, the last door opens to reveal all of Bluebeard's previous wives. 'Jane Eyre's' Mr. Rochester looks like a Teletubby in comparison. What doesn't work nearly so well in a concert version: having Bartók's thick orchestration surge directly behind the singers, rather than being curbed by a pit. Balances tended to be on the very edge of legibility. It didn't help that 'Bluebird's' singers had very different projection to begin with. Christian Van Horn was more easily heard over the din. He was a natural Bluebeard, his powerful, sepulchral bass-baritone softened by a seductive warmth. One easily understood why Judith fell in love with such a morbid figure to begin with. As his opposite, mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova had a narrower, milder vocal palette but convincingly evoked Judith's mounting horror, gasping through jagged consonant clusters. Breezy Leigh — also the narrator in Salonen's recent 'Bluebeard' at the San Francisco Symphony — intoned the poetic, introductory text with the right amount of gravitas, the hall darkened save for a single spotlight illuminating her at stage right. 'Bluebeard's' libretto is crammed with references to specific color: blood-red, blue-green, ghostly white. Parham illuminated the terrace level behind the stage with colored light throughout, sometimes lifting hues directly from the text. Other times, he set out to create his own based on the scene's feel. (That said, with the audience facing rows of closed doors on the terrace and stage level, it felt like a lost opportunity to incorporate at least some of those into the staging, however on-the-nose it might have been.) In the libretto, the opening of the fifth door casts 'bright light' into Bluebeard's darkened castle, accompanied by organ and auxiliary brass in the gallery. At that glorious, triple-forte moment, as Salonen turned to conduct the brass up above, Orchestra Hall itself flooded with light, brightening the faces of an astonished, awe-struck audience. Moments like these are what music is made of — treating the audience as part of, not mere witness to, the spectacle. Salonen understands that. Too few do. Also worth noting: Attend CSO concerts this week or last, and you'll notice two substitute first trumpets: Cincinnati Symphony principal Anthony Limoncelli and Pittsburgh Symphony assistant principal Conrad Jones, in that order. CSO principal trumpet Esteban Batallán remains on leave to play in the Philadelphia Orchestra, with a looming end-of-month deadline to decide whether he will return to his seat or remain in Philly. On Friday, the CSO also announced that concertmaster Robert Chen will withdraw from concerts Feb. 20–22 as he continues to recover from rotator cuff tendinitis. Solo violinist Stella Chen — a California-born Queen Elizabeth Competition winner — takes over. While we're talking principal players, a note of appreciation to oboist William Welter, a CSO member since 2018. His solo in Jan. 30's 'Don Juan' was one for the ages: almost imperceptibly quiet at first, and never losing its delicacy and humanity as it crested. It was pure musical magic, no visuals necessary. Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic. The Rubin Institute for Music Criticism helps fund our classical music coverage. The Chicago Tribune maintains editorial control over assignments and content. Originally Published: February 7, 2025 at 2:23 PM CST
