I think choreographer Catey Ott, a student of yoga, wants to honor that practice for its power to center, calm, strengthen, renew and summon the courage to go on. The full title of the program presented by her Catey Ott Dance Collective at Danceworks Studio Theatre last weekend, Total Emersion = Emotion Emission Immersion...

Combining aerialists, jugglers and acrobats with classical music played by an orchestra is the most exciting idea to hit the symphonic pops circuit in some time. Cirque de la Symphonie played three concerts with Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra last weekend to large and diverse audiences. The best thing about the Saturday evening performance was...

The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra presented a run of five performances of Messiah last week at three locations. I caught the Saturday evening performance at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, our city’s traditional, grand and elegant space. The cathedral is also Milwaukee’s most acoustically satisfying among its large churches...

The Milwaukee Ballet’s Nutcracker creates a child’s world without condescension. It charms like a happy youngster running up to you with open arms. Michael Pink’s choreography is also intellectually satisfying in that careful attention is paid to narrative logic...

The old adage “the show must go on” came to mind Saturday evening when one member of the vocal quartet Anonymous 4 was hospitalized not long before the 5 p.m. Early Music Now concert at St. Joseph Center Chapel. If the remaining three members were agitated by circumstances (and who wouldn’t be?), it was not apparent...

Our community needs young artists to show us with candor their sense of our time, and to grapple with formal traditions and invent new styles. So the Dance Department of UW-Milwaukee’s Peck School of the Arts is providing a vital service with New Dancemakers: Insight, two programs of rigorously developed choreography on the subject...

The great thing about Classical Music around the holidays is that there is just so much of it available, and none need fall into the dreaded schmaltz category (all too easy to do at Christmastime). Indeed, two local ensembles avoid the cheap stuff and go right for the luxuries of Christmas past...

One hundred and fifty years separate the works on the upcoming concert by the Prometheus Trio; hence concertgoers will be exposed to very different styles of chamber music composition in these four works for violin, cello and piano. Wolfgang Mozart (1756-91) completed his first trio when he was 20 years old, then didn’t return to the form for a decade, but when he did he created far more sophisticated...

Frankly Music presented an all-Shostakovich program at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music last Monday and Tuesday evenings. Pianist Adam Neiman kicked off the program with Three Fantastic Dances and 13 of the 24 Preludes, Op. 34. Neiman often sliced the air with sharply drawn phrases, playing with assertive...

I have never experienced an opera performance more undermined by poor set design than the Florentine Opera Tosca production that opened last Friday evening. Noele Stollmack’s set consisted of an uncomfortably steep raked platform, vast drab spaces in dark colors, and little else. Chic contemporary minimalism simply...

Classical Music trivia questions: What do composers Mozart, Caldara, Biber, Salieri and Bruckner have in common? Or: What do composer Franz Schubert and conductors Hans Richter, Felix Mottl and Clemens Krauss share in common? There’s but one direct link...

Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) first came across Victorien Sardou’s play La Tosca while it swept Europe’s theaters in the late 1880s, featuring Sarah Bernhardt in the title role. He immediately thought it most apropos for opera. With a larger-than-life villain, distressed heroine and doomed romantic hero, indeed he was right, but...

When guest conductor Lawrence Renes was last at Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra he led a questionable account of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. Based on that, I did not know what to expect with his return to MSO last weekend to conduct Anton Bruckner’s...

In a move of programming both bold and innovative, the Turtle Island Quartet came to the Wilson Center for the Arts for two nights last weekend. The sold-out performances kept audiences spellbound, whether the quartet played solo or in collaboration with...

The symphonies of Anton Bruckner (1824-1896) are often compared to things huge and noble, like mountains and forests and sunrises and sunsets. They are so expansive they seem to suggest vast glorious landscapes. Like whales, though big and weighty, they’re also supremely graceful. A poet once wrote that Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony would make a good peace treaty between humans and whales. Bruckner lived in landlocked...

The young South Korean conductor Shi-Yeon Sung had the unenviable position of being the first guest conductor in this MSO season. In all other concerts before this, including regional touring, the musicians have essentially been through a bracing orchestral boot camp led by new music director Edo de Waart. The discipline and ensemble improvements in balance...

As a critic I don’t come across many breakthrough events that go far beyond expectations into sensational territory, showing what’s possible. Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra’s concert performance last weekend of Béla Bartók’s opera Bluebeard’s Castle was electrifying and magnificent, the first watershed achievement of the Edo de Waart era at MSO...

Danceworks is presenting “Simone Ferro and Friends II,” a concert of related dances by Ferro, including an excerpt from the wild Urrou, Urrou (which premiered last June at UW-Milwaukee) and four brand-new works. The unifying piece, I think, is Snapshots, created for two men and six women, all fine, from the...

Bela Bartok transmuted the haunting peasant melodies of his native Hungary into powerful modern music even as he played songcatcher, recording fast fading sonic traditions from Eastern Europe and places as distant as Turkey and Egypt. He composed only one opera...

“Simone Ferro and Friends II,” a concert of five premieres by choreographer Simone Ferro, will be presented by Danceworks from Oct. 30 through Nov. 8 at Danceworks Studio Theatre, 1661 N. Water St. Ferro has worked in radically different styles on three continents in her career as a dancer and choreographer. As a child in Sao Paulo...

The pastel kingdom painted on the front drop revealed a world of substance and feeling in Michael Pink’s humane, new version of Cinderella for the Milwaukee Ballet. His choreography was a perfect match for the chromatic melodies and complex harmonies of Prokofiev’s score, played gorgeously by the Milwaukee Ballet Orchestra...

Milwaukee Symphony Chorus (MSC), the premier choral group in a choral town, is rarely heard without orchestra. That opportunity arose in a pair of concerts last weekend at St. Anthony Church, at Ninth Street and Mitchell. Another of the city’s distinguished church interiors, its acoustics are wonderfully flattering to choral music. In this environment, unaccompanied...

There’s long been a certain anxiety among Classical Music’s lovers and practitioners that somehow our music will one day fade into oblivion. Could modern pop culture with its disposable music and ever-shortening attention span spell Classical Music’s doom? But all is truly not lost when we observe...

I continue to marvel at what I’m hearing at Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. In only four programs, plus some regional touring, since beginning as music director, Edo de Waart has fundamentally changed...

Choreographer Molly Shanahan founded her Chicago company Mad Shak knowing she had something to express in dance. Fifteen years later, she’s crystallized her vision. After years of collaborative work with large groups of dancers and live musicians, during which she built a national reputation, she made a full length solo for herself in 2003...