Worried about sounding like the bland sentiments of a Hallmark card, I would not normally use the words love and joy to describe a performance. However, they richly apply to Nicholas McGegan's work as guest conductor with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra last weekend. His love and joy in music making is contagious, spreading to the orchestra and the audience. Though I have only heard the last half of the MSO's 50 years, I would guess that McGegan has been the most successful guest conductor...

Forget the weatherman. Those seeking an accurate predictor of the year's first snowstorm need only to check the performance schedule of the Wild Space Dance Company, whose December shows are unfailingly met by unfortunate winter maelstroms. The pattern has become so unflinchingly reliable that Artistic Director Debra Loewen decided to embrace the gods of winter this year with Snow, a new performance that acknowledges our unavoidable link with the cruelest season...

You know that something's not right when you feel no rise of tears at the end of Madama Butterfly, and observe no emotion in anyone in the audience within view. This is despite Puccini's masterfully melodramatic music, and the suicide of a Japanese bride who made the mistake of trusting in the love of an American naval officer. The Florentine Opera production of last weekend missed the mark. The problem probably was not the cast, which was competent to good. On Saturday evening Barbara Divis appeared in the title role. (Robin Follman played the part on Friday and Sunday.) Divis has enough vocal color and...

What is early music? Once in a while an innovative concert on the excellent Early Music Now series raises that question. The vocal ensemble Trio Mediaeval, from Oslo, pushed boundaries and definitions in a program of Norwegian folk songs last Friday night at All Saints' Cathedral. Folk music is old music by nature, its anonymous origins lost in time, passed from one singer to another, and undoubtedly undergoing changes along the way. I recall folk music as incidental content on past Early Music Now concerts, but...

On Aug. 7, 1829, 20-year-old Felix Mendelssohn boarded a steamer to visit a group of islands off the west coast of Scotland called The Hebrides. "Towering green waves were rolling into a cavern that was strange beyond belief, its many pillars resembling the interior of a monstrous organ, black, resonant and serving no other purpose than just being there," he wrote of the Isle of Staffa's most famous feature: Fingal's Cave. The encounter inspired him to compose his greatest concert overture...

A great piano performance of almost any literature excites me. Somewhere in my adult reaction are the dreams of my 12-year-old pianist self, who listened to recordings by famous artists then ran to the instrument to attempt imitation. Once in a blue moon a gripping performance brings up those delusional boyish hopes, an embarrassing but oddly awakening memory. Sometimes we need to be reminded that music can inspire us to dream. Such thoughts were provoked by Horacio Gutiérrez's performance of Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with the Milwaukee...

"Back by popular demand!" is so often misused that people tend to tune it out, but it perfectly fits two upcoming concerts. First there's the pairing of Ensemble Musical Offering (EMO) Artistic Director Joan Parsley with Cuban-born classical guitarist Rene Izquierdo (their joint venture last season was by all accounts a great success). The concert, titled "Baroque Beauty and Classical Gas," takes listeners to EMO's Baroque heart and soul and also through the classical guitar repertoire. Izquierdo performs the Preludio from Partita for Solo Violin No. 3 in E Major, BWV 1006 by...

Classical music is replete with stories of composers who gave us many great works for which posterity is most grateful, but for whom we are left to wonder what might have been had they lived longer. One such story is that of Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940). Born in Durango, Mexico, Revueltas studied in Mexico City, Austin, Texas, and Chicago, spending much of the 1920s in the United States. He spent the '30s in his native Mexico (apart from a tour of Spain in 1937), and was assistant conductor of the Orquesta Sinfónic...

A fundamental strength of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra is the high artistry of a few key musicians. Among them is Todd Levy, soloist in the concerts of last weekend in Carl Maria von Weber's Clarinet Quintet. (The string quartet parts were given to a reduced string section.) With masterful technique Levy demonstrated why the clarinet is the most richly multi-faceted of woodwind instruments. Levy presented arresting contrasts and colors: bubbling fountains of sound, plaintive melancholy, athletic leaps and scales, ethereally birdlike ornaments, the...

Dancing with chairs is nothing new. Before Flashdance, before Fred Astaire, possibly even before people thought to sit in them, dancers were sharing the stage with chairs. It might be the lowly chair's ability to double as an even lowlier stool, or it might be the contrast between the dynamic dancer and the static object. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. There's a danger in working with chairs: Because it's been done so much, it risks becoming a cliché. That danger, though, means that when done well, the payoff is even greater. In the hands of an inventive, solid company like Danceworks, the audience is almost certain to get that payoff.