Susan Hall
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Recent Articles:
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Curtis Symphony at Carnegie Hall Music
Smith, Sibelius and Beethoven with Jonathan Biss
By: - Feb 09th, 2020Curtis Symphony is on its annual eastern tour. At Carnegie Hall, led by Osmo Vänskä, they performed a new work by Gabriella Smith, a graduate of Curtis. She spent the 2015-16 season as Artist Year Fellow. She dedicated a citizen-artist year of national service in the Philadelphia region. For those who don't quickly imagine trigonometric functions, the title of her new piece f(x) = sin²x –1/x is a smooth, slightly curving line that rises. f(x) = sin²x –1/x is a delightful piece, set in the natural world Smith treasures.
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Pipeline at Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C. Front Page
A Searing Take on Black Male Anger and Rage
By: - Feb 07th, 2020Pipeline by Dominique Morisseau opened at Lincoln Center Theater in July of 2017. Since it premiered, the play, a multi-faceted look at the 'pipeline' young black men travel from high school to prison, has had more performances across the US than any other play. It is easy to understand why. This powerful presentation of the role of parents, teachers, security guards and administration in this all too familiar path, the play provides rich opportunities for actors.
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Queen for Nine Days Reigns at Jordan Hall Front Page
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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Object Collection Opera at La Mama Music
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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Kathryn Hunter As Timon of Athens Front Page
At Theatre for a New Audience
By: - Jan 25th, 2020Timon of Athens gets a brilliant characterization by Kathryn Hunter at Theatre for a New Audience. This huge character is played by a diminutive woman who holds us in her thrall every moment she is on stage. In the first part of the play, Timon enjoys her wealth, mindlessly giving her ‘friends’ whatever they want. Her Steward tries to tell her that if she keeps gifting at this pace, she will soon be penniless. Distinctive characters move across the stage, intriguing us.
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Julian Wachner's Rev 23 at Prototype Front Page
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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Cion at Prototype Festival Front Page
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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Ellen West by Ricky Ian Gordon Front Page
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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Hot Magadalene at HERE Front Page
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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Jeremy Schonfeld's Iron & Coal Front Page
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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Garrett Fisher's Blood Moon in World Premiere Front Page
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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TON presents Honegger with Felix Valloton Front Page
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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30 Americans at the Barnes Foundation Front Page
Not Incidentally Black Artists
By: - Dec 24th, 2019Representative works from the Rubell Family collection are on view at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. This is the 10th anniversary presentation of 30 Americans which has travelled the country, but have been seen only once before in the eastern United States. The Barnes presentation is striking. The art even more so.
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The Jack Quartet in Residence at New School Front Page
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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The Thin Place by Lucas Hnath Front Page
Playwrights Horizons Holds a Seance, Sort Of
By: - Dec 21st, 2019Lucas Hnath is a master storyteller, weaving threads from seemingly odd places into a seamless whole, which always intrigues. Playwrights Horizons has mounted his The Thin Place, in which shifting forms ask deep questions. Some suggested answers are novel.
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Lucy Shelton at National Sawdust Front Page
Legendary Singer of Contemporary Song Lofts Stravinsky and Rochberg
By: - Dec 16th, 2019Lucy Shelton, the legendary soprano, did not let us forget. If we don't live in the action and passions of our musical times, we risk not having lived at all. Igor Stravinsky vocalise, with no words and only sung notes, introduced the evening.
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Seance with Benjamin Britten Front Page
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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Judgment Day at Park Avenue Armory Front Page
Richard Jones and Christopher Shinn Disturb and Thrill
By: - Dec 13th, 2019Entering the drill hall at the Armory, we are greeted first by sounds of birds flitting through the tall, pine trees in a forest stage left and right. Branches are laden with snow. The platform of a train station fills the front of the station. The scent of the plywood from which the big blocks of the moving stage are built, also wafts through the hall. The station master’s home is above the tracks. His wife often sits in the window, observing the action below. Express trains roar by, their lights glancing off the ceilings and the other block structures on a shiny floor, whose surface reflects. We are taken in.
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Heartbeat Opera's Der Freischutz Front Page
Louisa Proske Creates a Present Moment
By: - Dec 11th, 2019Der Freischutz is everything an 1821 opera should be in a present day performance. The brilliant conception by Louisa Proske, credited with the adaptation and direction, surrounds us from the moment with enter the theater. The circle in the square encompasses the audience. Next to the home of Agathe at one point in the circle is a looming rock which is part of the Wolf Canyon. The orchestra is inside the circle under one section of audience. In the largest seating area, a platform extends. The singing actors use all these spaces. They come very close to us at time, ignoring our presence, but allowing us to see into their souls. Immersion hardly describes what the production offers.
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Amahl and the Night Visitors Front Page
Gian Carlo Menotti's Christmas Spirit for Today
By: - Dec 10th, 2019On Site Opera revived what one hopes will become an annual production of Gian Carlo Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors. In choosing settings for familiar and unfamiliar operas, On Site adds an intriguing dimension to the form. With Amahl, the location in the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen returns the opera to its original meaning.
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Joe Rosen Presents Clarinet Quintets Front Page
New Insights Into the Form
By: - Dec 07th, 2019An active patron of New York music associations, Joe Rosen is a first-rate amateur clarinetist who opens his home to salons. Here young musicians accompany him in chamber music pieces. Recently he changed his method of operation. Instead of transposing one string instrument's part for clarinet, he is performing quintets specifically written for the instrument. The clarinet's mellow, earthy timbre is revealed.
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MsTrial at New World Stages Front Page
Can a Lawyer Be Truthful and Succeed
By: - Dec 05th, 2019Dep Kirkland asks us to inhabit the legal world and fathom truth from within the walls of a well appointed law office. The leather sofa, floor-to-ceiling bookcase, long wooden table and oak desk with curtained view of the city, act as silent signifiers.
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Seance with Benjamin Britten at Crypt Front Page
String Quartets One and Two Spectral
By: - Dec 05th, 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 Interitance on Broadway Front Page
Matthew Lopez, Stephen Daldry and Bob Crowley Truple Team for Brilliance
By: - Nov 28th, 2019The moving two-part drama, The Inheritance, began its stage life at the Young Vic in London. The play transferred to the West End and is now on Broadway. For seven hours, divided into two sessions of theater, the history of gays in American unfolds. At its heart, the playwright Matthew Lopez weaves language of great beauty mixed with humor. Spanish words are sprinkled throughout, ay meo (oh God), la fiesta (the party) and maracon (faggot) among them. These are not phrases but rather exclamations. The word 'faggot' is never used in the play.
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Lucy Dhegrae at National Sawdust Front Page
Giving Voice to Rape
By: - Nov 24th, 2019Lucy Dhegrae, a superb mezzo soprano, lost her singing voice after an assault. In finding her singing voice again, she follows the sounds of a human from the first grunts and breaths to the glorious free sounds of song. Dhegrae is National Sawdust's Artist-in-Residence.
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