What I understand now about my piano recitals that I hated so much was that they weren't supposed to be easy or pleasurable, but they had a goodness hidden inside them that made even the unpleasant parts meaningful.
What Mr. Ax and Mr. Bronfman offered in their duo recital program was not so much a dialogue as a cooperative collaboration.
"This recital is about counterpoint — not so much within the pieces (despite the two fugues), but between the pieces," Mr. Hough wrote in the program for his Carnegie Hall performance, presented before a large, rapt audience on Thursday night.
Some, one suspects, might have felt a bit shortchanged, for this was not so much a recital as a London Sinfonietta concert in which Norman took part in two out of four items.
He asks if he may confess his sins, and in the course of his recital he mentions that he has "so much treasure, both silver and gold, that seven carts wouldn't be able to carry it".
The title track of World Peace Is None of Your Business is redolent and infectious, but Morrissey's eternal-adolescent worldview infects its don't-vote-they'll-only-get-in sentiment, and his earnest recital of global troublespots – "Bahrain, Ukraine, so much pain" – is depressingly asinine.
Eliot Fisk has found a way to enliven the confining format of the solo guitar recital: invite friends and share the spotlight, though not so much that a listener might mistake the concert for a chamber music program.
She and her students loved working on video so much that she even had a recital online.
Each song is a little scene in itself, and you can do so much more with your voice in a recital.
The New York Post's Frank Scheck gave the show 3 out of 4 stars and says: "As the sorcerer Prospero, [Patinkin] delivers Shakespeare's poetry with lilting vocal cadences and swirling hand movements in what isn't so much a dramatic performance as a musical recital...
