Music
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Seance with Benjamin Britten
The Crypt Conjures Brittain
By: - Dec 14th, 2019The Crypt Session as imagined and realized by Death of Classical point the way to music’s lifefulness going forward. New, young audiences wait for months to get a ticket to one of these events. Tickets sell out moments after events like this Salon Séance are announced. Andrew Ousley, whose creation Crypt Sessions and The Catacombs assures us that more events in new locations are coming. A cave is promised in the future.
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The Jack Quartet in Residence at New School
Exploring the Different Sounds of the Bow
By: - Dec 21st, 2019Jack Quartet is in residence at the Mannes School of Music, the New School. They opened their program with Clara Iannotta’s “Dead Wasps in the Jam-Jar." The title is rich with suggestion. Wasps are not bees, but the buzzing was reminiscent of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestral interlude from "The Tale of Tsar Sultan."
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TON presents Honegger with Felix Valloton
Sight and Sound at Metropolitan Museum
By: - Dec 25th, 2019Leon Botstein, the polymath conductor, has taken on a delightful series, Sight & Sound, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. With The Now Orchestra (TON) he offers a musical program which is related to a current exhibit at the Museum.
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Garrett Fisher's Blood Moon in World Premiere
Prototype Presents a Moving Contemporary Noh drama
By: - Jan 13th, 2020Blood Moon is a chamber opera created with consummate sensitivity and skill by a team of artists, including the composer, a passionate appreciator of Noh theater, and the prize-winning playwright, Ellen McLaughlin. One of McLaughlin’s specialties is the adaptation of classic dramas for our time. The composer also likes to jump off from the past, and react to a work created many moons ago in the present now.
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Jeremy Schonfeld's Iron & Coal
Rock Opera at Prototype
By: - Jan 14th, 2020Iron & Coal is a live rock show presented as part of the Prototype Festival at the Gerald Lynch Theater in New York. The title refers to an iron will to survive, but also to the charred emotions that remain after a concentration camp incarceration. The songwriter Jeremy Schonfeld tells the story of his father’s arrival in America at 11. He searched for his place in our sun, and especially to answer the question: for what purpose did I survive when so many others did not.
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Hot Magadalene at HERE
Danielle Birrittella Sings Richly of Love and Lust
By: - Jan 15th, 2020Danielle Birrittella, the co-creator of Magadalene, has a rich, inventive lyrical delivery of the poet Marie Howe's words. She dares to explore the divide between feminine and erotic in Magdalene, a work having its world premiere at HERE in New York.
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Barrington Stage Company 2020
Music, Music, Music
By: - Jan 16th, 2020Barrington Stage Company will present two World Premiere musicals and new productions of a Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical classic, a Tony Award-winning musical revue, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning play. BSC will also perform outdoors for the first time with free performances of one of the company’s World Premiere musicals and featuring the company’s popular Youth Theatre.
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Ellen West by Ricky Ian Gordon
Jennifer Zetlan is a Force of Nature
By: - Jan 17th, 2020Jennifer Zetlan gets a full opportunity to display her extreme force of nature in voice and acting in Ricky Ian Gordon’s Ellen West. The work premiered at Opera Saratoga last summer. Cast changes have been made. The distinguished Nathan Gunn takes on multiple roles. He is featured as the doctor, based on Ludwig Binswanger who wrote the classic case study of his patient whose pseudonym was Ellen West.
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Cion at Prototype Festival
Gregory Maqoma Erupts in a Graveyard
By: - Jan 20th, 2020Graves are marked with sticks crossed. They seem to bend in the movement of the professional mourner and his followers. Light is spotted from the ceiling, sometimes two spots and at others six. The lights rhythmic entrances and exits fit perfectly with incessant beats of the feet. The brilliant South African choreographer Gregory Vuyani Maqoma has adapted Zakes Mda’s novel Cion.
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Julian Wachner's Rev 23 at Prototype
Biblical Opera is Fun
By: - Jan 21st, 2020We are immediately struck by the lime color of the Rev 23 set: the walls, lights, desks in a school room in hell where God’s lessons are being taught, or unlearned. Clever James Darrah captures both the weight of Rev 23 and its surprising hopefulness in his production. Responding to an exuberant score by Julian Wachner, the Furies dance together across the classroom, lofting comments, instructions and denigrating the ideas of Lucifer. This is his world.
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Object Collection Opera at La Mama
Kara Feely and Travis Just Give Us Space Control
By: - Jan 27th, 2020The Downstairs stage at La Mama is darkened. People bustle around, cleaning equipment, moving it about, casting lights and cameras on it. We the audience are not quite sure whether or not the performance has begun. In fact, the minute we walk into the theater, we are in the drama. It is the intention of Object Collection, the producers and creators, to keep the audience at high alert. Daniel takes a seat on the cosmic throne, a cross between dental chair and space rocket. The quotidian and the other worldly will be liberally mixed in music and action for the next hour.
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The Devil’s Music: The Life and Blues of Bessie Smith
By Angelo Parra at Center Repertory Company
By: - Feb 02nd, 2020Despite 7,000 attending her funeral, Bessie Smith lay in an unmarked grave for many years, as her ultimately estranged husband pocketed funds donated for her headstone. That was remedied in 1970 with a gift from one Janis Joplin.
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Evita in South Florida
At The Wick Theatre In Boca Raton
By: - Feb 01st, 2020The Wick Theatre presents a powerhouse production of Evita. Triple-threat performers and Behind-the Scenes crew shine. The production runs through Feb. 23 in Boca Raton.
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Robert Johnson King of the Delta Blues Players
A New Biography by Bruce Conforth & Gayle Dean Wardlow
By: - Feb 02nd, 2020The King of the Delta Blues, Robert Johnson, died in relative obscurity on August 16, 1938. Fifty years later he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame when it was founded in 1986. In 1961 Columbia released King of the Delta Blues Players with Volume Two in 1970. The Complete Recordings a two-disc set, released on August 28, 1990, contains almost everything Johnson recorded, with all 29 recordings, and 12 alternate takes.
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Queen for Nine Days Reigns at Jordan Hall
Gil Rose Brings Us Arnold Rosner's Lady Jane Grey
By: - Feb 03rd, 2020Jordan Hall in Boston was the setting for a concert version of Arnold Rosner’s The Chronicle of Nine. His only opera for full orchestra is having its world premiere. Gil Rose, recent Grammy winner for best recorded opera, finds treasures in the archives and brings them to our attention. We are fortunate indeed.
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Ballroom at CVREP
Lively Revival of 1970s Musical
By: - Feb 12th, 2020Ballroom features the music of Billy Goldenberg, with a libretto by Jerome Kass, and the lyrics by multiple Oscar, Emmy, and Grammy award-winning songwriters Alan and Marilyn Bergman, under the direction of Ron Celona. It’s the boldest and most audacious production in CVREP history.
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One Evening:Two Works at Komische Oper, Berlin
J. Weinberger and G. Verdi
By: - Feb 15th, 2020It is always a time for heightened expectations when one goes to any performance at the Komische Oper, Berlin. It will not necessarily be enjoyable for everybody but it will definitely always be provocative. The Komische Oper presents as one performance: Fruehlingsstuerme and La Traviata.
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National Sawdust Presents Against the Grain Opera
Intriguing Peek Into Artists-in-Residence Program
By: - Feb 16th, 2020National Sawdust, an artist led Brooklyn group, is a leading incubator of new music. One aspect of their work is an artists-in-residence program. Committed to assisting the creation of music that has impact, artists are encouraged to draw from personal experience and their interpretation of the world. Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup explores the opioid crisis.
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Roland Colton Brings Us a Piano Music eBook
Mentioned Music Available at a Click as You Read
By: - Feb 18th, 2020Forever Gentleman, by Roland Colton, has several novel twists. It tells the tale of Nathan Sinclair, an architect and sometimes concert pianist of first-rate talents in both disciplines. When we meet him, he has been introduced into a good woman who deeply attracts him. He vows to settle a debt to a loan broker. He has incurred the debt because a client has been unable to pay up. One thread in the story is a Dickensian tour of Victorian debtor courts and jails in 1869. Colton is able to lead us through this tortuous path with vigorous, clear writing.
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Momentary Opens in Bentonville, Arkansas
A Kraft Cheese Factory Transformed
By: - Feb 20th, 2020The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is a jewel created by the architect Moshe Safdie near a natural spring called Crystal and a bridge construction which is built into the museum. It was conceived and financed by Alice Walton whose family created Walmart, a company headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas. Now other members of the family have joined her in creating an exciting performance space in an old Kraft cheese factory in town.
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Ivan Fischer and Budapest Festival Orchestra
Great Performers' Mahler at Lincoln Center
By: - Feb 25th, 2020There is no doubt that Gustav Mahler paired the Kindertotenlieder, symphonic poems of Friedrich Rückert and his Symphony No. 5. Seldom are they programmed together. We were given an extraordinary performance of both works in David Geffen Hall. Iván Fischer conducted the Budapest Festival Orchestra.
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Lincoln Center Great Performers' Mahler
Surrounded by Concerts and Films
By: - Feb 26th, 2020Lincoln Center's Great Performers surrounded us with Gustav Mahler for five days. In addition to a concert by Ivan Fischer conducting the Budapest Festival Orchestra, three films were offered.
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The Pajama Game a Perennial Favorite
At California's Palm Canyon Theatre
By: - Feb 28th, 2020“The Pajama Game” opened last weekend in Palm Springs. The musical debuted in 1954 on Broadway, as the Korean War was declared over, and pajamas back then was still considered the choice of men’s sleep-ware. Enduring standards of the vintage musical include “Hey There,” “Steam Heat,” and “Hernando’s Hideaway.”
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Verdi's Il Trovatore
At Opera San José
By: - Mar 01st, 2020The great Enrico Caruso once noted that all you need to make Il Trovatore a success is to cast the four greatest singers in the world. Although the production reveals a couple of minor glitches, the overall effect is so scintillating that the flaws are not worth discussing.
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Welser-Möst Conducts the New York Philharmonic
From the Domestic Life of Strauss to Widmann's Streets of Babylon
By: - Mar 01st, 2020Franz Welser-Möst leads what is arguably the best orchestra in the United States, the Cleveland. His mastery of Richard Strauss' music is well-known. He began the program with the US premiere of Babylon Suite by Jörg Widmann, composer in residence at Carnegie Hall this year.
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