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Jonathan Patrick

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Dallas Symphony Orchestra's Performance of Philip Glass and Anton Bruckner Was Magical

By Jonathan Patrick
Feb 5, 2018

Even compared to the grandeur and rapture that normally accompanies well-executed symphonies inside the Meyerson Symphony Center, Friday night felt exceptional. The Dallas Symphony Orchestra's program was divided into two portions — one a contemporary work, Philip Glass' Double Concerto for Two Pianos, and the other a towering classic, Anton...
Texas Ballet Theater's Dracula Was a Lesson In Emotional Intelligence

By Jonathan Patrick
Sep 16, 2015

Consider Dracula––really consider him. Despite what commerce and fandom suggest, the story of Dracula (any vampire, really) is hinged on emotional intelligence and moral complexity. To put a finer point on it, the reader or viewer is forced to confront certain issues in ways that challenge the accepted moral and...
The Best Classical Concerts in Dallas this September

By Jonathan Patrick
Sep 4, 2015

Summer's fading, and fall's creeping around the corner. Which means the classical season is underway––almost. While in many ways the season proper won't hit its stride until October, there's plenty of performances to make this a month to look forward to. What follows are the events we're most excited about...
SOLUNA'S and Nasher Soundings' Pierrot Lunaire Did Not Disappoint

By Jonathan Patrick
May 22, 2015

What's music apart from the production and organization of sound? Truthfully, not much. More or less, that's it. That's music's skeleton. Allow some space to take into account certain conceptual nuances here and there and you have its flesh, too. Of course, there's a lot of wiggle room left in...
Artist Kevin Beasley Talks 'Black Rocker,' His One-Night-Only Sound Installation Debuting at the DMA

By Jonathan Patrick
May 15, 2015

Renowned multi-medium artist Kevin Beasley's CV reads like a solid career's worth of exhibitions and achievements, complete with an exemplary eduction as its foundation. Except, Beasley's only been at this thing for roughly nine years. His future is exceedingly bright, and gaping. This evening Beasley will debut a new, site-specific...
The DSO's Requiem Was Lopsided and Underwhelming

By Jonathan Patrick
Apr 20, 2015

Here we have the sound of creativity longing for immortality, reaching for infinity and failing brilliantly--melancholy fashioned as a grand statement on the frustration of living with an expiration date. Inside, genius is showcased as elegantly brittle, the transcendent made vulnerable to the grim and the lowly; the supernatural grounded,...
The Best Classical Concerts in Dallas This April

By Jonathan Patrick
Apr 2, 2015

For many Dallas listeners, April's been a month long anticipated: the month that brings Mozart's Requiem. You could almost be forgiven for blowing off the rest of the month, were it not for a series of unexpectedly brilliant programs peppering the calendar in Requiem's wake. Courtesy some of the smaller,...
Schoenberg Took Life at the Nasher on Saturday

By Jonathan Patrick
Mar 2, 2015

For better or worse, I eat this stuff up. Dark, depraved, macabre, mysterious in that delicately frightful manner, I delight in music that takes me somewhere else, especially if that somewhere is both alien and shadowy. I'm not alone. There's a particular legion of listeners--largely social outliers, closet weirdos, lifetime...
Where to Find Classical Music Vinyl and CDs in Dallas

By Jonathan Patrick
Jan 27, 2015

Amidst all the recent talk of a "vinyl resurgence" and the renewed admiration for physical media in music, one niche seems to miss its fair share of the attention. Countless reissues, think pieces and brick-and-mortar retail stores have sprung up in favor of re-emphasizing the importance of tangible music formats;...
SYZYGY's Ligeti Was Black Comedy

By Jonathan Patrick
Nov 14, 2014

Wails, bellows, purrs, barks, hisses, laughter, gurgles, screeches, yelps, retching, squeals, gurgles, screams, grunts and groans. No words. Just clusters of prickly, spindly instrumental spattering, and the human voice reduced to animalistic expression. If John Cage had aimed his sights at prepared vocal chords instead of pianos, this is what...
The Best Classical Concerts in Dallas this November

By Jonathan Patrick
Nov 6, 2014

In a month marked by pioneering modernism, concert standards take a backseat to rarely performed masterpieces by the likes of Charles Ives, Gyorgy Ligeti and Bela Bartok (yes, more Bartok, again!). The nights are now longer, and the air is taut with its first chills of the season--it's just the...
Flinching Eye Collective Defies Music Conventions, Visits Dallas Friday night

By Jonathan Patrick
Nov 3, 2014

Many years ago something happened that made me question the nature of music, and ultimately all "art" for that matter. I was at a friend's house playing a record (Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music), when his mom complained about the noise. She asked, "what's that sound?" "It's music," we replied...
Dallas Opera's Season Opener, The Marriage of Figaro, Is Beautiful Even Without Supertitles

By Jonathan Patrick
Oct 27, 2014

The men's urinals are where you learn the most about an ongoing opera. The unedited state of things--the real nitty-gritty. (In all fairness, I'm sure the women's room is equally revelatory). Inside, pre-performance, the occupants were academics and critics, dishing on a half dozen lesser-known facts concerning The Marriage of...
The Best Classical Concerts in Dallas this October

By Jonathan Patrick
Oct 1, 2014

September was a fine opening to the 2014-15 classical season, even if it had the occasional off-kilter gait. However, this month's schedule looks even more substantial than the last; is this where the season launches in earnest? More Shostakovich, more Mozart, more Beethoven, some complex offerings from Prokofiev, Bartok and...
With Mahler 9, The DSO Was Visceral And Emotionally Arresting

By Jonathan Patrick
Sep 24, 2014

There's someone crying, another...whimpering? But that's it. The Meyerson is a vacuum. There's an odd mood coursing through the rows of seats, a breathless silence, total and creaky. It hangs in the air like an iron blanket. The audience is motionless, wholly engaged, in awe. Here we have this grand...
Anna Clyne's Rewind Topped an Asymmetrical Opening Weekend at The FWSO

By Jonathan Patrick
Sep 15, 2014

This last weekend marked the opening of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra's 2014-2015 classical season. Saturday evening kicked off with an honorary video commemorating musical director Miguel Harth-Bedoya's 15th season with the FWSO, followed by a short talk with new composer-in-residence Anna Clyne (on her composition Rewind) and the National...
The Best Classical Concerts in Dallas this September

By Jonathan Patrick
Sep 5, 2014

There's a lot of Beethoven in the bloodstream this month. Just in time too. In the wake of summer's blast-furnace oppression, a whole lot of Beethoven is just the ice bath we need to ready ourselves for another season of classical offerings. We have prodigies, a world-class violinist, some Shostakovich,...
100 Dallas Creatives: No. 77 Filmmaker & Environmentalist Michael Cain

By Jonathan Patrick
Jul 28, 2014

Mixmaster presents "100 Creatives," in which we feature cultural entrepreneurs of Dallas in random order. Know an artistic mind who deserves a little bit of blog love? Email [email protected] with the whos and whys. Save for his disarming charm, were you to meet Michael Cain in person you'd never guess...
Philip Glass' Best Recordings

By Jonathan Patrick
Feb 21, 2014

It's hard to overestimate the impact Philip Glass has had on classical music. Apart from being (arguably) the world's greatest living composer, Glass almost single handedly brought minimalism into contemporary popular culture -- influencing legions of rock and electronic artists while simultaneously introducing classical music to a generation of otherwise...