Naturally, it also helps when the group has a strong soloist to take the lead, as it will in this concert when the formidable pianist Garrick Ohlsson performs Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 1.
Since then, Sunset Jazz, a series of four twilight shows on Thursdays in August, has emerged as a highlight of Jazz Forum Arts's formidable lineup of free summer concerts, a distinction the series stands to build on this year as it presents a stylistically diverse mix of first-rate performers from Havana, Hastings, Harlem and Osaka, Japan.
The concert ended with the formidable Sonata in C for Cello and Piano, which Britten wrote for his good friend Mstislav Rostropovich, who played the premiere, with Britten at the piano, in 1961 at the Aldeburgh Festival in England.
On hand to endorse this assessment and introduce the concert was no less formidable a voice in composition than Milton Babbitt, who met Schnabel in 1935 while studying with Roger Sessions, one of many composer colleagues who respected Schnabel's music.
If your tastes run to the more esoteric, the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn hosts THE PROPENSITY OF SOUND, a five-concert series saluting three formidable experimental composers.
His new one, "Como un Nino Celoso," in concert can show off the formidable arsenal of melodies and rhythms he uses for his improvisations.
On Sunday afternoon, for the second concert in the series, the formidable pianist and Ligeti champion Pierre-Laurent Aimard offered scintillating accounts of four of Mr. Ligeti's visionary piano études.
The release of the Jonas Brothers 3-D concert movie will galvanise the formidable tween audience base, while the coronation of Slumdog Millionaire at the Oscars will motivate new crowds to get out and see Danny Boyle's phenomenon.
But most important, the disc will give brave listeners a chance to cozy up to "Threni," a notoriously formidable work hardly ever encountered in the concert hall (or, one need hardly add, on the radio).
Hearing so many Rodgers and Hammerstein chestnuts strung together in a single concert reinforced the image of the formidable songwriting team as the purveyors of a rigorous pop philosophy of sweetness and light and the power of positive thinking.
