Classical Underground News
The music celebrated romance and Valentine's Day
by Laurence Vittes
Since I first wrote about Alexey Steele and Olga Vlassova's Classical Underground five years ago in Gramophone, the number of salons and other similar classical music initiatives has multiplied into all corners and all musics of the globe. What most distinguished Classical Underground from the beginning still remains, the casual grace it accords to celebrity and the comfort with which celebrity lays in the limelight while Alexey, the musicians, the visual art and the audience take center stage. At Classical Underground, you can see Midori turning pages or, as was the case February 16, Martha Argerich a face in the crowd.
The music celebrated romance and Valentine's Day.
The wonderful young Mühlfeld Trio (clarinetist Benjamin Mitchell, cellist Michael Kaufman and pianist Brendan White) played Brahms and Mikhail Korzhev played Rachmaninoff. Tara Davison, accompanying herself on a guitar, charmed everyone with the iconic cantilena from Villa-Lobos' Fifth Bachianas Brasileiras and her own transcriptions of songs by Pauline Viardot, a 19th century Maria Callas who could also compose.
The evening was transformed by Classical Underground favorite Eduardo Delgado,
one of the great pianists who came out of Argentina in the early 1940s, including Argerich, Daniel Barenboim and Bruno-Leonardo Gelber. Delgado took the audience's breath away with a set of Latin dances and a Chopin Fantasy that was technically regal, suffused with idiomatic warmth, and presented with a timeless sense of phrasing.
The sold-out audience fell in love.
Just another Valentine's Day special at Classical Underground.