Alan Sherrod

With a flourish and a grand gesture of au revoir, the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra finished its 2011-12 Masterworks season last weekend with its usual pair of concerts: “A Touch of France,” covering four works by French composers. As usual, time ...

Knoxville Opera’s superlative Rossini Festival production of Otello last weekend fused the brilliance and solidity of seasoned operatic performers with a solid cast of younger singers possessing major, and truly exciting, vocal talents.

With just a glance, even without a note of music being heard, one knows instantly why tenor Michael Austin is known in opera houses of the world for his portrayal of the title role in Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello—he looks exactly ...

This was not the Verdi of Rigoletto or La Traviata, but a Verdi who had possibly been influenced, subconsciously of course, by his musical nemesis, Wagner. The work had musical continuity and complex orchestration—the first that one might call truly ...

Due to its familiarity with audiences, a work such as Gustav Holst’s early 20th-century suite The Planets, the headliner on last weekend’s concerts, burdens a conductor with the weight of numerous comparisons.

With the benefit of historic distance, it seems only natural that the music of Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg belongs together on the same program, as it did with Sunday afternoon’s Knoxville Symphony Orchestra’s Chamber Classics Concert.

One need look no further than last weekend’s Knoxville Opera production of Charles Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette to see what has changed in Knoxville over the last five years or so. In contradiction to the tired stereotype of opera-goers, the ...

With over 400 years of music in our western repertoire, modern concerts devoted to just one composer often run the risk of appearing overly focused, fussy, and academic, even for listeners with more than a casual interest. The Knoxville Symphony ...

The reasons for La Traviata's popularity are clear—Giuseppe Verdi’s score is tuneful, lush, and addictively evocative; the libretto has a seemingly perfect balance of character complexity, stage simplicity, and literary intrigue. The challenge, of course, is to embrace the popularity ...

It was an evening of exploration—and perhaps even discovery—as the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra trod familiar trails and also ventured into some new territory with its concerts last weekend.