Reviews
MURRY SIDLIN, conductor
Washington Post Article, 10/8/2010
““...That story is at the heart of "Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezín," a multimedia concert-drama created by Murry Sidlin and given a spectacular, bare-knuckle performance Wednesday night at the Kennedy Center. The requiem itself is almost unbearably powerful on its own -- a searing tone poem about the end of the world, operatic in scope and run through with celestial melodies and cascades of fire and brimstone. But Sidlin's setting of the music, incorporating film of the camp, interviews with survivors, and actors describing the dramatic background, was handled with both dignity and power, and pushed the requiem to even more harrowing depths and exalting heights...”
Stephen Brooks, The Washington Post,
on the performance given
at the Kennedy Center, Washington D.C. on 10/6/2010
Murry Sidlin, the Dean of Catholic University’s School of Music, has a creative and venturesome mind...Sidlin’s tribute to this courageous young man [Rafael Schächter] is a generous act of homage from one artist to another.”
Tim Page, staff writer/music critic
Washington Post, April 19, 2004
"Never in Israel’s music history have we had the privilege of watching anything as awe-inspiring as the unique DVD of (Sidlin’s) Verdi Requiem staged.” (Speaking of the PBS DEFIANT REQUIEM, a production of Oregon Public Broadcasting in association with Brandenburg Productions, Inc.)
Hanoch Ron, music critic, “Yediot Aharonot”,
January 21, 2005
'Defiant Requiem' stirs audience with dramatic touches...Adding a multimedia dimension to a classical concert is nothing new, but an imaginative and sensitive application can still seem fresh. There was an extraordinarily compelling example over the weekend. I've heard performances of Verdi's Requiem by more seasoned choruses and orchestras, and certainly heard them in better spaces than Catholic University's Pryzbyla University Center, but none that moved me more deeply or left me more unsettled than the one given there Sunday night.
Tim Smith, music critic
“Baltimore Sun”, April 20, 2004
"Sidlin is a conductor who speaks as skillfully as he conducts, very much in the passionate tradition of Leonard Bernstein."
San Diego “Union-Tribune”
"Murry Sidlin conducted with sweep and passion without slighting detail. The large orchestra played splendidly for him." ( Long Beach Opera, King Roger by Szymanowski.)
Los Angeles “Times”
"Good orchestras from Chicago, Paris, and Vienna have come to town, and I have heard others in New York. Sidlin interpreting the Schubert Unfinished in Long Beach is the event I will remember the longest."
Alan Rich on KUSC, Los Angeles
RUSSIAN MUSIC AS IT SHOULD BE PLAYED
At last, someone who understands Russian tempos, and what a difference it makes. Last night at the Orpheum, American conductor Murry Sidlin and violinist Mark Peskanov teamed in one of the most satisfying evenings of Russian music heard here in years.....quickened the pulse and intensified the drama"”
Vancouver (B.C.) “Province
"’I want to make Schächter famous, as the hero he was,’ is Sidlin's explanation of why he devised this program. He certainly does that, and with the context he supplies, he makes it the most powerful Verdi Requiem I have ever experienced.”
Joseph McLellan, critic emeritus of the “Washington Post”
Press Quotes
KMI
