Susan Hall
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Bernstein at the New York Philharmonic Front Page
Alan Gilbert Conducts
By: - Nov 06th, 2017Americans who do not live in the bubbling cauldron of New York City, claim to long for a simpler, easier time. When picket fences were white, the mail was delivered regularly, and people's lives echoed the covers of trite magazines sold in supermarket checkout lines. However, New Yorkers know different. That difference was on proud display Saturday night as Alan Gilbert led the second of three programs at the New York Philharmonic dedicated to the music of Leonard Bernstein.
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Psalms at the White Light Festival Front Page
Touring New York Churches to Hear Music
By: - Nov 05th, 2017The Psalms Experience presented by the White Light Festival of Lincoln Center includes nearly one thousand years of musical settings by 150 different composers. World renowned choirs collaborate to present songs from the Book of Psalms. Each concert has a unifying theme, such as suffering, power, and powerlessness.
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National Chorale Celebrates 50th Front Page
Everett McCorvey a Brilliant Leader
By: - Nov 04th, 2017To listen to Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms and then the raunchy, life-affirming Carmina Burana is heaven. Or hell, if you prefer it. Sometimes Carl Orff, the composer of Carmina Burana does both and it is these moments, like love joined in a soprano's stratasphere, that give particular pleasure.
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Steven Osborne Performs Vingt Regards Front Page
A Messiaen Marathon at White Light
By: - Nov 01st, 2017The Stanley Kaplan Penthouse at Lincoln Center is a special space. When it is darkened, lights twinkle in the windows and reflections go out into the night. Here Steven Osborne, a consummate pianist, performed Olivier Messiaen's iconic "Vingts Regards sur l'enfant." We swirled in mystery, yearning and the power of faith.
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The Exterminating Angel by Thomas Ades Front Page
American Premier Has Gleaming Cast
By: - Nov 01st, 2017The creation of new works remains how the art of opera continues, against steep odds and media indifference, to grow and survive. This week, the Metropolitan Opera did their bit by opening Thomas Adès' latest opus: The Exterminating Angel.
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Conrad Tao, Charmaine Lee and Nate Wooley Front Page
Brooklyn's Memorial Hall Hosts a Ceremony
By: - Oct 31st, 2017Tao is everywhere. Tucked into the back of a stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, he had the nerve to portray the iconic Glenn Gould in David Lang’s opera ‘loser.’ He is in the bowels of a church for a Crypt Session, and now at Roulette, a venue created to honor Dada and chance music. He is a thrilling artist.
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Comedies at Polonsky Shakespeare Center Front Page
Marcello Magni and Joe Houben Teach Us Laughter
By: - Oct 30th, 2017Marcel is being examined and interviewed by a clown evaluator (Houben) to see if he is able to continue his career. Juggling hats, the manipulation of hands and arms, are added to basic, biking, batting, swinging, and swimming. Marcel demonstrates that, if he is no fit as a fiddle, he is facile with his limbs and trunk. No question that he can make us laugh, and cry too.
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Knives in Hens Magnificent in New York Front Page
David Harrower's Newly Classic Play Riveting
By: - Oct 29th, 2017Knives in Hens is an ineffably moving theatre piece, a three-hander which depicts the struggles of a putatively ignorant farm girl who lives in indeterminate space and time. Her movement toward growth is specified in her wish to name the world she sees about her.
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Berlioz' Damnation of Faust at BSO Front Page
A Dramatic Legend Rides High
By: - Oct 29th, 2017Damnation of Faust turned out to be one of Berlioz' most popular compositions. It was the first work in which he wrote the libretto himself. Berlioz loved Virgil, Shakespeare, and Goethe above all. He could not entrust the words of these authors to anyone else. In Damnation, we have a great presentation of the Faust story. The Boston Symphony, Tanglewood chorus and thrilling soloists brought Berlioz safely to heaven and hell.
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Dolores Claiborne by Tobias Picker Front Page
New York City Opera Hits a Home Run, Again
By: - Oct 27th, 2017New York City Opera's production of Tobias Picker's latest opera, Dolores Claiborne, honors the composer in a riveting theatrical presentation. Oliver Sacks explored the musical brain in his Musicophilia. The connection between the two hemispheres of the brain is enlarged demonstrably in talented musicians. So too a section of the hippocampus. Picker, who began composing at four, was studied by Sacks. Whether or not his brain reflects musicality because he started playing and composing early, or because he was born with this ability, remains to be answered. What is clear in Dolores Claiborne, as produced by NYCO, is how great his talent for opera is.
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Orchestra dell' Accademia Nationale at Carnegie Front Page
Barbara Hannigan Sings Sciarrino
By: - Oct 22nd, 2017Sir Antonio Pappano has made his mark at Royal Covent Garden over the past decade and a half. He is also the music director of the Orchestra dell' Accademia Nationale di Santa Cecilia (Rome). They return to Carnegie Hall after an almost half century absence. Pappano presented a work composer Salvatore Sciarrino wrote especially for the great and adventuresome soprano (and conductor) Barbara Hannigan. Mahler's Sixth Symphony followed.
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L’Orchestre Symphonique at Carnegie Front Page
The Idea of North
By: - Oct 21st, 2017L’Orchestre symphonique de Montréal is one of the finest symphonic ensembles in North America. They are a stellar symphonic ensemble with a long history and a sound all their own, combining precise European string playing with the lusty, leather-lunged brass one associated with this continent.
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Gordon Getty Unearths Ghosts Front Page
A Pair of Seasonal Operas
By: - Oct 20th, 2017The Center for Contemporary Opera is presenting the premier of a pair of operas by Gordon Getty. One is based on Edgar Allan Poe’s The House of Usher. The other, on Oscar Wilde’s sympathetic take on a ghost who cannot die, poor guy.
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Turandot at the Metropolitan Opera Front Page
James Morris' 1000th performance at the Met
By: - Oct 18th, 2017Turandot is Giacomo Puccini’s final, unfinished work. It is a a grand fantasy of legendary China as reimagined through the lens of Italian romanticism. It is a farm tale, the story of an ice-hearted princess and the fearless Prince who wins her hand. It is seen (wrongly) as the end point of the genre of Italian opera. It is also, along with La bohème, the last of the Metropolitan Opera’s giant Franco Zeffirelli productions, crowded extravaganzas that evoke the opulence of a bygone era. (In this case, we’re talking about the 1980s.)
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Barnatan and Weilerstein at Carnegie Front Page
Woo Too with Mendelssohn and a New Steven Mackay
By: - Oct 18th, 2017Listening to two great artists performing cello sonatas at Zankel Hall, you are let in on a secret that should be widely broadcast. In intimate chamber music, performed with only two instruments, you enter the deep, developed world of great composers whose work is the subject of conversation. Chorale to recitative, pluck to bowed, arpeggios to long, sweet lines. Never a moment to rest as we are pulled closer and closer to the essence of a composer.
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Musical America Announces Awardees Front Page
Andris Nelsons, Sondra Radvanovsky, Mason Bates Honored
By: - Oct 17th, 2017The prestigious Musical America annual awards have been announced. The BSO musical director Andris Nelsons is artist of the year. Sondra Radvanovsky is vocalist. We interviewed Nelsons in 2011 before his first concert with the BSO at Carnegie Hall. Radvanofvsky has been on our radar since Peter Gelb tried to oust her and Placido Dominago stormed into his office and told him he could not remove an important artist from the Met roster.
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Thomas Ades and Friends at Carnegie Hall Front Page
Warm up for The Exterminating Angel
By: - Oct 16th, 2017Thomas Adès will be Artistic Partner to the Boston Symphony Orchestra for the next three years, helping to fill their Maestro's wish for abundant new music. Adès' gifts as a composer were on display in Zankel Hall. Principals from the cast of his third opera, about to have its North American premier, sang. The music, his own, and that of Schubert, Britten and Purcell among others, could count as the music of his friends, from long ago and now. As a pianist, Adès has a special touch.
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The Home Place at Irish Repertory Theatre Front Page
Brian Friel's Play Directed by Charlotte Moore
By: - Oct 14th, 2017The Last Rose of Summer and Minstrel Boy were written by Irish poet and lyricist Thomas Moore and are at the heart of the Irish soul. Satisfying direction by Charlotte Moore, undoubtedly a descendant, brings the poetry and music home in Brian Friel's "The Home Place."
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American Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall Front Page
Doing What's Right
By: - Oct 13th, 2017A peculiar sense of existential dread hung over Wednesday night’s concert at Carnegie Hall, the first of the young season featuring the American Symphony Orchestra under the baton of its long time music director Leon Botstein. For this concert, titled “The Sounds of Democracy”, Botstein chose 20th century music by Leonard Bernstein, Roger Sessions and Aaron Copland, leading lights of American music in the last century but now largely ignored by the fast-food reality-television culture of the 21st.
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Opera at the Apollo Front Page
We Shall Not Be Moved Triumphs
By: - Oct 09th, 2017We Shall Not Be Moved opened at the Apollo last weekend. Under the bright lights on the Apollo marquee on 125th Street in Harlem, the gathering crowd was dressed in high fashion, from tinsel and glitter to designer jeans and platform heels. Talk was all of the subject matter and the artists who had created this opera. Bill T. Jones is well-known, but the composer and librettist not so. People were going to see the work of their own community.
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Crossing at BAM Front Page
Whitman Focus of Composer Matthew Aucoin
By: - Oct 08th, 2017Crossing premiered at ART in Cambridge, Mass. in 2015. Now it comes to BAM as part of the Next Wave Festival.
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Rome Neal as Thelonious Monk Front Page
Laurence Holder's Play Captures the Jazz Icon
By: - Oct 07th, 2017Laurence Holder’s iconic one man show Monk brings the jazz legend life to the stage. Rome Neal, actor and director, becomes Thelonious Monk, and for 90 minutes we move through the defeats and triumph’s of the man’s work, life and artistic era.
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Boulez at the Park Avenue Armory Front Page
Repons from IRCAM
By: - Oct 06th, 2017The Park Avenue Armory is presenting one of Pierre Boulez’ signature compositions, the first one to use IRCAM with all its innovation. Relatively simple material can be made to acquire sophisticated layers without losing the sound of its origins. Repons is the first product of IRCAM’s 4X computer.
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Carnegie Hall Opens with Philadelphia Orchestra Front Page
Four-Armed is Fore-Warned
By: - Oct 06th, 2017the original plan was to have Rhapsody's piano part played by Lang Lang, the international piano sensation and one of the biggest stars of this new firmament of young classical artists. Then Lang suffered an arm injury and plans were changed. The program still featured Rhapsody, but in a version fortwo pianos. The second was manned by Chick Corea, a beloved figure from the world of jazz. And serving as Lang Lang's left hand, his pupil Maxim Lando. At 14 years old, Lando is a product of Lang's International Music Foundation.
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Lincoln Center and NY Philharmonic Abandon Sound Plan Front Page
Mostly Mozart Offers a Repair Model
By: - Oct 05th, 2017The sound at David Geffen Hall during the fall and spring seasons is often awful. A six hundred million dollar plan, which would have brought the Hall to Lincoln Center Plaza level has been abandoned. Now there is talk of Mostly Mozart-ing the Hall.
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