Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Sunday, July 2, 2006

'DAS PARADIES' WAS SUPERB PERFORMANCE Bravo to Timothy Carney, music director of the Hawai'i Vocal Arts Ensemble and artistic performance genius. Carney knows how to challenge both his performers and the public to reach beyond the ordinary for the possibility of creating true, musical, aesthetic experiences.At the June 25 concert at the Hawai'i Theatre, of the rarely heard and even more rarely performed "Das Paradies und Die Peri" by Robert Schumann, Carney conducted, coached, coerced and exhorted a ragtag group of musicians, the local volunteer chorus and an insightfully selected group of soloists to a level of performance that is rare in concert halls anywhere in the world today.This was no clinical revival of detached music-making — often conveyed by even major symphony orchestras when tackling "difficult" works such as this. The performance had a sense of creation and occasion about it, with all performers intensely involved in making something special happen. It did.

Don Dugal
Kaimuki