Susan Hall
Bio:
Recent Articles:
-
NY Philharmonic Performs Chaplin's City Lights Front Page
Classic Movie with Superb Score
By: - May 19th, 2016Alan Gilbert, Music Director of the New York Philharmonic has an uncanny knack for programming. Extending the ideas of where music does and does not belong in the classic/classical repertoire and how it should be produced. He has brought us semi-staged operas, adventuresome new music and live performance of film scores that were written to be heard live while the film is screened. City Lights, quintessential Chaplin, was accompanied by Chaplin's own score, played by the Philharmonic. The score had been restored and reconstructed by the conductor, Timothy Brock.
-
Mannes Produces Adamo's Little Women Front Page
Joseph Colaneri Conducts
By: - May 07th, 2016Little Women is Mark Adamo's first opera, and its spirited presentation of the Marsh family of Concord captures perfectly the struggle of a young woman to move from the warmth and support of her family home into the world of a woman. Simone de Beauvoir loved this book, as has the feminist community. Little Women seemed a perfect choice for Mannes, and composer Adamo, taking bows and hugging the cast, seemed to agree.
-
Eve Queler Reprises Classic Parisina Front Page
Angela Meade Thrills in Donizetti
By: - May 05th, 2016Donizetti wrote this opera on an unusually tight schedule. Whether its differences from his other work are deliberate or accidental we will never know. The catchy arias we associate with the composer are missing, but the music is still delightful. Eve Queler introduced the opera in 1974 and reprised it at Lincoln Center's Rose Theater. A remarkable evening.
-
Utah Symphony Celebrates at Carnegie Hall Front Page
Thierry Fischer Conducted 75th Anniversary Performance
By: - May 02nd, 2016The Utah Symphony under Thierry Fischer gave an exciting and moving evening of music in celebration of their 75th anniversary. The Utah Symphony Orchestra was built by promoting 20th century American and European music. This priority was established by Maurice Abravael, the conductor who led the orchestra for 30 years. He retired to work at Tanglewood for another 10 years.
-
Richard Bean's Toast Delightful Theater Front Page
Celebrating Brits Off Broadway 2016
By: - May 01st, 2016Toast comes with its most recent British cast. Set in a bread factory around 1972, this is a guy world and a factory world. In the US both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are reminding us of the value of this kind of work.
-
Master Voices Presents Dido and Aeneas Front Page
Kelli O'Hara and Victoria Clark Star
By: - Apr 29th, 2016Kelli O'Hara can sport a delightful, rich opera voice and Victoria Clark, looking like a combination of Lynn Redgrave and Camilla Parker Bowles camps it up as a Sorceress bent on doing evil. A new prologue by Michael John LaChiusa has chorus members collapsing and hints of history being made.
-
Manhattan School of Music's Superb Opera Front Page
Ibert and Ravel Entrance
By: - Apr 28th, 2016Persée and Andromède by Ibert and L'Enfant et Sortilèges by Ravel with a brilliant libretto by Colette, her only opera, are staged by the Manhattan School of Music Opera Theater. This school's productions are among New York's finest. The singing is of professional calibre. The productions are considered from sets to costumes to a first-rate orchestral accompaniment. Year after year you can count on MSM for an evening of operatic pleasure.
-
Votes the Musical Re-visited Front Page
New Production Suggests the Clinton Dynamic
By: - Apr 23rd, 2016Lisa Wright-Matthews and Wayne Miller as ersatz Clintons give us the first couple past and future?
-
Aoife Duffin Embodies A Girl Half-Formed Front Page
Irish Words Affecting and Harrowing
By: - Apr 21st, 2016A Girl is a Half-formed Thing has been translated from novel to stage by Annie Ryan, who also directs. A solo performance by the brilliant Aoife Duffin evokes the world of a young Girl, growing up with an older brother who is dying of brain cancer. Her mother's absorption with the boy leaves the Girl unprotected, but also free to spread her wings. Astonishing images arrest the ear.
-
Jeremy Denk at Carnegie Hall Front Page
Poet of the Piano Rocks With Ragtime
By: - Apr 18th, 2016Jeremy Denk is a formidable writer and pianist. While a man of such iconoclastic and apt thoughts might let 'intent' dominate performance, Denk succeeds in melding his ideas into the keyboard and creating music of seamless satisfaction.
-
Tilson Thomas Leads SFO at Carnegie Front Page
Sasha Cooke and Simon O'Neill Evoke Mahler
By: - Apr 17th, 2016Sasha Cooke and Simon O'Neill singing Mahler's Song of the Earth gave ravishing performances with the San Francisco Orchestra under Michael Tilson Thomas. Woodwinds and brass also stood out in Schubert and Mahler.
-
James Levine Resigns as Met's Music Director Music
Tenure Ended by Chronic Illness
By: - Apr 16th, 2016Speaking to the Maestro about chocolate in February, it was clear that he had not found the answer to uncontrollable hand and arm movements, although his mind was as a sharp as ever. We agreed that Mondel's was the best hand-made chocolate in New York, but he also likes Mrs. See's chocolates in Los Angeles. It would be encouraging to hear that he will continue working with young talent at the Met and at the Juilliard School.
-
ACJW Ensemble at Carnegie Front Page
Weill Hall Setting for American Composers
By: - Apr 14th, 2016Charming ACJW pianist Michael James Smith told us that when Carnegie first opened 125 years ago, no American music was played. Now we had an American evening, from Copland and Ives to an early Glass chamber piece and the stunning Carnegie premier of Steven Mackey's Micro Concerto. Cellist Caleb van der Swaagh explained tongue-in-cheek how hard it is to be a cellist and how easy it is to play 35 different percussion instruments, many of them featured by Mackey.
-
Laurence Holder's Sugar Ray Front Page
Woodie King, Jr. Directs Reginald L. WIlson
By: - Apr 12th, 2016Legendary actors Wesley Snipes, Laurence Fishburne, Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson took their first steps on the stage directed by Woodie King, Jr. before they blasted onto the Big Screen. Woodie has found a new giant, Reginald L. Wilson, who he directs in a mesmerizing performance at Harlem Besame, on the exact spot that Sugar Ray Robinson, arguably America's greatest boxer, conducted his enterprises in Harlem.
-
American Academy Awards to Vocal Composers Front Page
Kate Soper and Lewis Spratlan Honored
By: - Apr 12th, 2016Contemporary music is alive and well in America and two special composers have been honored by the VIrgil Thomson Award and the Charles Ives Prize.
-
Six Characters in Search of a Puppeteer Front Page
At La Mama Theodora Skipitares Creates Families Thru Eons
By: - Apr 09th, 2016No classic drama remains unexplored by the gifted puppeteer Theodora Skipitares. Now at La Mama, she presents Six Characters in Search of More than an Author. Or Actor for that matter. An intriguing take on Pinocchio, Oedipus, Rhoda (the Bad Seed), and the Louds, America's first reality family. Margaret Mead is a surprising tour guide.
-
Alexandre Tharaud Performs Bach Front Page
A Crypt Session at the Church of the Intercession
By: - Apr 05th, 2016Alexandre Tharaud is more than a musician's musician. His heart-rending performance of the Bach Goldberg variations put him at the same pinnacle of pianists as the Bach work is for music afficiandos. In a concert series performed in an intimate acoustic marvel, the crypt of the Church of the Intercession in upper Manhattan, Tharaud delivered a mesmerizing take on this crown jewel of compositions.
-
Opera Philadelphia's Yardbird at the Apollo Front Page
Lawrence Brownlee Superb as Charlie Parker
By: - Apr 03rd, 2016Charlie Parker ended up an unknown in Bellevue's morgue. While the opera Yardbird is set in the jazz club Birdland then on 52nd Street, affectionately named after the genius of bebop, Bird himself is in purgatory, not yet buried, writing a final symphonic work and plagued by memories of the women in his life. Tenor Lawrence Brownlee makes an indelible impression in the title role.
-
ACJW Rocks National Sawdust Front Page
Carnegie Hall and Juilliard Launch Their Best
By: - Mar 31st, 2016The accessibility of contemporary music was never in question at a superb evening with the ACJW Ensemble at Nation Sawdust in Brooklyn.
-
Lucy Prebble's Compelling The Effect Front Page
Off Broadway at Barrow Street Theatre
By: - Mar 20th, 2016Lucy Prebble selects topics of heightened interest and then makes of them marvelous plays. Enron on the collapse of a fake US energy company is now followed by an exploration of drug trials and what they tell us about human beings.
-
Paul Appleby, the Natural, at Carnegie Front Page
A Master of Language and Meaning
By: - Mar 17th, 2016Paul Appleby has rocketed to the top of the music world. This modest, charming man has a voice for the ages and communicates in many languages with an easy skill. At Zankel Hall in New York he sang about the infinite varieties of love as expressed by Schumann, Wolf, Berlioz and Villa Lobos. Matthew Aucoin's Merrill Songs were premiered. This irresistible master tenor speaks to the heart.
-
Salonen Honors Messiaen at NY Phil Front Page
Tristan and Exhaulted Love Revealed in Turangalila
By: - Mar 13th, 2016Audiences were often ahead of critics in appreciating Messiaen's music. Turangalila was given a warm, tener, violent, expressive, often magical and always colorful performance at David Geffen Hall. Young people were packed in to hear the composer.
-
LaMama Discovers American Music Front Page
Dvorak Pricks Up His Ears
By: - Mar 12th, 2016The ever inventive Czecholovak-American Theatre tracks Antonin Dvorak's arrival in America and shows us how he discovered unique American sounds from cottonpickers in the South to Hiawatha.
-
Ivo Van Hove Meets Arthur Miller Front Page
Stark, Timeless Setting Sets Emotional Wallup
By: - Mar 08th, 2016In anticipation of hot director Ivo Van Hove's production of Arthur Miller's Crucible, we re-visited his current hit production of Miller's A View from the Bridge. Physicalized acting in a plain set provides the perfect visual for the intense emotional action that impels Miller's drama.
-
Anna Fitzgerald's Reverse Cascade Front Page
Puppetry Flies at The Tank
By: - Mar 04th, 2016The draw of puppetry may be the space that is left for an audience member's imagination. In a delicate figure of a circus performer and athlete who is losing control of her body to MS. The story of Judy FInelli is movingly and engaging told by Anna Fitzgerald's troop. Ellen Cherry on the electric cello adds a touching dimension.
<< Previous Next >>