Susan Hall
Bio:
Recent Articles:
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We, the Innumerable at National Sawdust Front Page
Nilofar Nourbakash Captures Iranian Protests
By: - Oct 25th, 2022We The Innumerable is an opera created by the Iranian/American composer Niloufar Nourbakash with libretto by Australian aborigine Lisa Flanigan. Sara Jobin, who is committed to works which bring about peace and global understanding, conducted. National Sawdust staged. The opera tells the story of a woman who protects the truth at all costs It is set during protests in Iran after a contested election in 2009. It echoes in today’s protests.
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Anthony Davis X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X. Front Page
Record Released
By: - Oct 25th, 2022Known as the nation’s foremost label launched by an orchestra and devoted exclusively to new music, Grammy Award-winning BMOP/sound announced the world premiere recording of the revised version of Anthony Davis’s seminal opera X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X.
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Joshua Bell and Larisa Martinez at the 92nd Street Y Front Page
New York Hosts the Violinist and Singer Duo
By: - Oct 21st, 2022Joshua Bell and his wife, the soprano Larisa Martinez, performed together at the 92nd Street Y in New York. Paul Dugan accompanied on the piano with his own special touch
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TON Orchestra at the Rose Theater Front Page
JoAnn Falleta Conducts
By: - Oct 19th, 2022TON orchestra arrived at the Rose Theater under the baton of JoAnn Falleta. She is a conductor one wishes would spend more time in New York. Music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, she conducted at Tanglewood last summer. She brings thrilling musicality to her program choices.
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Death of Classical Presents Nico Muhly's The Street Front Page
Live Artists Parker Ramsey, Monica Wyche and Hannah Spierman
By: - Oct 16th, 2022The Street is a triptych of tones and textures created by composer Nico Muhly and writer Alice Goodman. Goodman points out that this is not a libretto. It is a meditation on Christ’s walk up the stations of the cross in Jerusalem on the day he would be crucified by his fellow Jews. Its take is a street scene, and on the streets where we live.
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Jennifer Koh and Davone Tines at BAM Front Page
Outsider Voices in an Alien Culture
By: - Oct 14th, 2022Across a crowded room at the Paris Opera, Jennifer Koh and Davóne Tines looked at each other and realized they had something in common, something that was different from everyone else in the room: their color. They have joined forces to bring ther unique stories to a culture they find alien. Everything Rises is presented as part of the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
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Tom Stoppard's Leopoldstadt Front Page
Family Secrets Brilliantly Revealed
By: - Oct 10th, 2022The playwright Tom Stoppdard’s mother, his only connection to his earliest life, born in Czechoslovakia and traveled to Singapore and then to England. She did not discuss her Jewish origins. Growing up in Britain, Stoppard asked her to write the family story. He gave her a beautiful notebook, which she returned. She would scribble the bare outlines in a small cheap exercise book. Now he fleshes the story out on stage in New York.
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Experiments in Opera Celebrates Tenth Anniversary Front Page
Everything for Dawn TV Series Format
By: - Oct 06th, 2022Experiments in Opera is celebrating its tenth anniversary. The statistics for artistic involvement are impressive. EiO has commissioned 85 new works from 55 composers collaborating with over three hundred performers, designers, and directors from the New York City artists community. Now they present opera in TV series format on All Arts.
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Cate Blanchett Becomes an Orchestra Conductor Front Page
Todd Field's Film Opens New York Film Festival
By: - Oct 03rd, 2022Cate Blanchett is an orchestra conductor Lydia Tár in Todd Field’s new film Tár, which premiered at the New York Film Festival. Anyone who has been exposed to Blanchett's performance will be eager to see her latest, mind-blowing work. This is also an opportunity for the unexposed to be introduced. Blanchett is an actress who will always take a dare and push herself beyond perceived limits.
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Opera Philadelphia Expands Poe's Raven Front Page
Toshio Hosokawa's Monologue with Dance
By: - Sep 29th, 2022Opera Philadelphia and the Obvious Agency present a choreographed Raven, based on Toshio Hosokawa's Monologue. The audience is transported by the fantastic music and dance.
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Opera Philadelphia Festival Returns Front Page
Rossini's Otello Features Lawrence Brownlee
By: - Sep 27th, 2022Opera Philadelphia brings Gioachino Rossini's Otello to the stage. Beethoven told Rossini that he should stay away from serious drama. It was not in his nature. That is not the only reason Rossini’s serious opera Otello has been largely ignored. When Verdi and Bioto wrote their Otello, it replaced Rossini’s in the repertoire. Now we can hear the glorious bel canto tenor Lawrence Brownlee and also Daniela Mack dazzle and emote as Rodrigo and Desdemona.
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Processional Arts Workshop at Columbia U. Front Page
Alex Kahn and Sophia Michahelles, Artistic Directors
By: - Sep 20th, 2022The beloved neighborhood tradition of shaping our stories in light returns, in person for the first time since 2019. Starting on September 17, Miller Theatre opens its doors for a week of free lantern-building workshops, culminating in a magical illuminated procession through Morningside Park. The theme of the 11th Morningside Lights is centered around how we memorialize.
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Jasper at Pershing Square in New York Front Page
Yonder Window Theatre Company Presents
By: - Sep 18th, 2022Jasper, a new play by Grant MacDermott, playwright in residence at Yonder Window Theatre Company, pack a deep punch. Giving birth to a child who is damaged is a blow to parents, who seldom have the skills to deal with cystic fibrosis, cerebral palsy and autism. In Jasper, MacDermott choses not to name the disease. He does not present us with their child.
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Close Encounters Announces a New Season Front Page
Treasures in the Berkshires
By: - Sep 14th, 2022Close encounters with music is an innovative and captivating presenter of music. Sublime chamber music concerts are enhanced by entertaining, erudite, and lively commentary by artistic director Yehuda Hanani. Programs include international soloists, and intriguing themes.
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Daisy Press Sings Hildegard Von Bingen Front Page
Angel's Share and Green-Wood Present
By: - Sep 12th, 2022Death of Classical keeps classical music alive in unusual and inviting locations and attracts the curious who often are unfamiliar with this form of music. Collaborating with the Green-Wood Cemetery in the Angel’s Share series, the audience walked through the beautiful Brooklyn graveyard to its Catacombs for a mesmerizing presentation of songs by a twelfth century composer, herbalist and politician, Hildegard Von Bingen.
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Deutsche Oper Presents Turnage Front Page
Greek Outdoors in KoolAide Colors
By: - Sep 06th, 2022Mark Anthony Turnage was very young when composer Hans Werner Henze asked him to create an opera for the first Munich Biennale Summer Festival. Turnage, already attracting attention for his musical language which draws on Miles Davis, Janácek and Stravinsky, had caught Henze’s ear. Henze’s own work ranges in reference from serialism, atonality, Stravinsky, Italian music, Arabic music and jazz, as well as traditional schools of German composition.
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Manfred Honeck Conducts at Elbphilharmonie Front Page
Pittsburgh Symphony Shimmers
By: - Aug 26th, 2022Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony have developed a specialty: revealing the texture of sound. In a concert at Elbphilharmonie, an event in the orchestra’s 75th year of touring, they displayed daring and diverse sounds not often heard. The Maestro and the musicians find buried clues to the balanced mix of rhythms, dynamics in detailed performance directions.
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Slavery Remembrance Day in the US Front Page
Dealing with Past Atrocities
By: - Aug 22nd, 2022On July 27, 2022, a bill creating a Slavery Remembrance Day, introduceed by Congressman Al Green of Houston, Texas, passed in Congress. August 20th was the date in 1619 White Lion ship with 20 “and odd” Angolans, kidnapped by the Portuguese, arrived in the British colony Point Comfort in Virginia.
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Sound at Wu Tsai Hall Front Page
Evaluating Acoustics at the New York Philharmonic
By: - Aug 16th, 2022In the whirlwind of announcements about the re-opening of David Geffen Hall, anti stain concert hall, Wu Tsai, we actually heard only one sound from the Hall, a single blast from a trumpeter in a hard hat. The Oklahoma State Univeristy orchestra will take up its residency and open the fall season on September 23rd. This may be the sound check.
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Phantom by F.W. Murnau at Elbphilharmonie Front Page
Wolfgang Mitterer Offers Original Score
By: - Aug 15th, 2022Phantom by F. W Murnau was presented at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany. This version of the film was accompanied by an original score by Wolfgang Mitterer.
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Louise Bourgeois at the Gropius Bau Front Page
Berlin Displays The Woven Child
By: - Aug 08th, 2022The late work of Louise Bourgeois is on view at the Gropius Bau in Berlin. The overwhelming space, high ceilings, light curators will let it in, never makes Bourgeois seem small. Perhaps a point.
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David Geffen Hall Prepares to Open Front Page
Alibaba Money Gets Naming Rights
By: - Aug 06th, 2022Lincoln Center offers venues for the performing arts and concert programs. Is there an audience for what is offered? John Goberman, who founded Live from Lincoln Center, remarked when he left the staff a decade ago, that from his point of view–where the rubber hits the road, there was no audience any longer for classical music. He went on to produce live orchestral accompaniments to films.
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Pierre-Laurent Aimard in Salzburg Front Page
Bartok and Ligeti Featured
By: - Jul 31st, 2022Pierre-Laurent Aimard chose as difficult a program as you could imagine. In the Grand Hall of the Mozartareum in Salzburg, the first half of his program focused on Bela Bartok’s small pieces done in grand style: Bagatelles, Etudes, and some Mikrokosmos. Ligeti followed the interval.
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The Inimitable Marlis Petersen in Munich Front Page
A Journey into Night and Our Psyches
By: - Jul 27th, 2022The Munich State Opera presents both opera and concerts during their annual July Festival. One star, Marlis Petersen, entranced at the Prinzregent Theater.
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La Boheme at the Munich State Theater Front Page
Otto Schenk's Set a Star
By: - Jul 26th, 2022Puccini’s music is beautiful and his notes sit particularly well in the human voice. Music written for the voice, as Puccini did, attracts audiences, especially when it is delivered by a stellar cast. Along with a rich musical mix, deep characterization draws us in. In the current revival of Otto Schenk production at the Munich State Opera, character is on full display amidst bantering bohemians and the flirtatious Musetta.
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