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3 days ago | 
startribune.com | Rob Hubbard
By Rob Hubbard Minneapolis native Evren Ozel has advanced to the finals of North America's most prestigious classical piano competition, the quadrennial Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. From a field that started with 28 pianists ages 18 to 30 from 16 countries, Ozel has reached the final six, thanks to impressive performances during three recitals and a Saturday night performance of a Mozart Piano Concerto with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra.
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4 days ago | 
twincities.com | Rob Hubbard
Fifty years ago, Hmong people first arrived in Minnesota as refugees from the wars of Southeast Asia. In their Laotian homeland, they were earmarked for destruction for having aided the U.S. side in the Vietnam War, and Minnesota became one of two states to help resettle the vast majority of those who escaped, California being the other.
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6 days ago | 
startribune.com | Rob Hubbard
Classical concert lore is full of great pinch-hitting stories. For example, stardom found a young Leonard Bernstein when he stepped in for conductor Bruno Walter on short notice, and teenage pianist André Watts made his name subbing for another ailing legend, Glenn Gould. While what happened on Friday night at Minneapolis' Orchestra Hall didn't reach that level of career breakthrough, it was pretty thrilling nonetheless.
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1 week ago | 
startribune.com | Rob Hubbard
By Rob Hubbard Piano soloist Alice Sara Ott will be unable to perform with the Minnesota Orchestra Friday and Saturday because she has acute tendinitis. Audiences instead will hear Beethoven's Fourth Concerto with pianist Conrad Tao as soloist. When Tao last visited, his performance of concertos by Mozart and C.P.E. Bach was named one of the Twin Cities' 10 best classical concerts of 2022.
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2 weeks ago | 
twincities.com | Rob Hubbard
Stephen Adly Guirgis is a New York City playwright who brings the world stories from the streets, where the conversations can sound astonishingly life-like and not for the squeamish. And his gift for creating complex and thoroughly human characters can be an actor’s dream.
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2 weeks ago | 
startribune.com | Rob Hubbard
Chamber music writ large: That's what you'll find at this weekend's St. Paul Chamber Orchestra concerts. The SPCO periodically presents chamber music, with a handful of orchestra members splitting off into small groups. These concerts take two works written for string quartet and give them the full-orchestra treatment. Add a couple more new works - including the premiere of an SPCO commission - and you have the rare major orchestra concert consisting entirely of pieces from the 2020s.
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2 weeks ago | 
twincities.com | Rob Hubbard
If History Theatre has a signature show, it’s “Glensheen,” which will receive its 10th anniversary production this summer. But the company currently has something onstage that may deserve the same kind of enduring presence in our local theater scene. “Whoa, Nellie!” is built around the life and times of a former Minnesotan with whom you’re almost certainly unfamiliar. Nellie King was a woman of the 1880s and ’90s who could be called a cultural curiosity.
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2 weeks ago | 
startribune.com | Rob Hubbard
By Rob Hubbard If you think of the classical music season as running from September to May, you're missing out on some fine opportunities to enjoy spectacular sounds in the more casual settings that summer affords. Here are eight great summer offerings around Minnesota, each featuring some marvelous musicians. Lyra Baroque 'Die Fledermaus' St. Paul Chamber Orchestra Minnesota Beethoven Festival Summer at Orchestra Hall
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2 weeks ago | 
startribune.com | Rob Hubbard
There was a lot of helplessness going around in late May of 2020. That's when a world already largely frozen in place by a pandemic was confronted by footage of a Black man being suffocated under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer. Composer Rollo Dilworth, a music professor at Philadelphia's Temple University, was among those struggling with how to respond to George Floyd's murder on a south Minneapolis sidewalk.
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2 weeks ago | 
house.mn.gov | Rob Hubbard
Some years, state legislative sessions surge to a climax on their final day, a flurry of activity providing a sustained adrenaline rush, culminating in smiles of satisfaction as a midnight deadline is met for completing the people’s business.
And then there are final days that fizzle.
Such could be said of 2025’s constitutionally prescribed final day of Minnesota’s legislative session.
