Susan Hall
Bio:
Recent Articles:
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Let's Have Fun with the YPhil Front Page
A Concert for Peace at Skirball
By: - Sep 18th, 2015The International Youth Philharmonic Orchestra was founded to celebrate the universality of music. They note: Every person on the planet is a note in a greater symphony, telling his or her story of joy, sadness or peace. Notes may link together, turning into melodies and songs that are powerful and strong. The YPhil is a symbol of the voice of the world fraternity.
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Isolde by Richard Maxwell Front Page
A Legend Re-Imagined at Theatre for a New Audience
By: - Sep 10th, 2015Richard Maxwell's language is musical in the delivery of his tribe of usual suspects: Jim Fletcher, Brian Mendes, Tory Vasquez and Gary Wilmes. The actors are curiously contained and liberated at the same time, and they invite us into the flow of the story.
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In Bed with Roy Cohn by Joan Beber Front Page
Hallucinating with Ronald Reagan and Others
By: - Aug 30th, 2015Imagining life's end as you enter illusion, resistance and acceptance is difficult. It is also difficult to portray. In this imaginative take on the end of controversial Roy Cohn's life, Christopher Daftsios creates a memorable, tortured figure. Directed by Katrin Hilbe to both find intimacy in crucial relationships and a froideur in others, this complex man intrigues to his last breath.
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New York International Fringe Presents Plath Front Page
Grease's Cultures Smashes Up Against Poet
By: - Aug 27th, 2015Sylvia Plath knew that her life after death by suicide would be larger than her life in life. The confluence of great gifts and great sensitivity made her life difficult. So too her German parents and then her husband, Ted Hughes. This musical portrait pictures poet Plath in 50's culture, a study of contrasts.
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Irish Repertory Theatre's The Weir Front Page
Distinctly Carved Characters Channel Ghosts in a Bar
By: - Aug 26th, 2015Season after season for twenty-eight years the Irish Repertory Theatre has produced plays which touch not only the soul of a nation, but the human soul. A culture in which everyone tells stories provides the bedrock for great story-telling literature. Plays like The Weir offer an artful slice of life and capture its poetry and pain. Playwright McPherson loves the monologue, and weaves four as individual stories into the stories of five residents of a small Irish town.
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NY Fringe 2015: Ideas Not Theories Front Page
Boston's Reynaliz Herrera Finds the Beat Everywhere
By: - Aug 23rd, 2015In nooks and crannies all over New York, talent is busting out in the 19th New York International Fringe Festival. Herrera is a percussionist who finds the beat wherever she is. In her entrancing concept of a kid in a warehouse music factory, buckets and bikes found lying on the floor offer opportunities for novel and instant sounds. They are even better than chocolate.
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Mostly Mozart Presents Emerging Talent Front Page
Cape Cod Chamber Music, Met Opera Baritone Plus Bard Pianist
By: - Aug 18th, 2015Mostly Mozart. adding a soupçon of musical interest for its audiences and a splendid opportunity for rising young talent to perform in important venues, offers a concert pre-concert, in which you might even hear Emmanuel Ax. Avery FIsher Hall, configured for the Festival, is an acoustically satisfying, intimate experience.
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George Benjamin Conducts ICE at Lincoln Center Music
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Ligeti's Favorite, is Stunning
By: - Aug 16th, 2015Mostly Mozart is committed to pushing the envelope. In engaging George Benjamin as composer-in-residence they have had him on hand for stage and full productions of his two operas. He has also conducted the work of other composers whose influence he imbibed. Claire Chase and the International Contemporary Ensemble show their stuff in two pieces by composers who influenced Benjamin and in Benjamin's chamber opera Into the Little Hill.
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Mostly Mozart Premier's Benjamin's Written on Skin Front Page
Gory and Beautiful, the Opera Succeeds Bartok and Berg
By: - Aug 13th, 2015After its smashing success at Aix-en-Provence, Written on Skin has been produced in London and Berlin and other European cities. Now it arrives in New York with 60 percent of the original cast, and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra which originally performed under the composer. Alan Gilbert takes the podium and brings forth an at once daring and lovely performance.
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El Exigente Botstein Brings Mexico to Bard Front Page
Revueltas, Chavez and de Falla Staged
By: - Aug 10th, 2015Leon Botstein calls our attention to the music and art of Mexico. Mexico is under-represented in symphony halls across the world. Botstein, who heads Bard and extraordinary music programs, is introducing extensive important Mexican compositions of the last century. While Carlos Chavez is less well known than Silvestre Revueltas, he was the center of Mexico's music life during his lifetime and is its lynchpin.
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Ethel Smyth's The Wreckers Front Page
Botstein Conducts at Bard's Summerscape
By: - Aug 03rd, 2015Ethel Smyth is the only female composer whose work has been produced by the Metropolitan Opera. An admirer of Wagner, Berlioz and Brahms, she in turn was admired by Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Thomas Beecham and Virginia Woolf. The Wreckers is her best known opera and Leon Botstein, ever on the alert for deserving but underexposed works, presented it in concert form in 2007. Now he gives us the full treatment at Bard.
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Rezo Gabriadze's Ramona at Lincoln Center Front Page
An Enchanting Puppet Romance Between Two Engines
By: - Jul 29th, 2015"The long forgotten and warm word 'locomotive' awoke in my mind - breathing vapor clouds, hoarse, smelling of coal smoke, even in wet weather." The passionate romance of two engines began here and takes an improbable journey as Ermon reminds his wife Ramona that you never say no when someone is in trouble. This is grown up puppetry from a great Georgian artist.
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Kafka on the Shore at Lincoln Center Front Page
Murakami's Tale Adapted for the Stage by Frank Galati
By: - Jul 26th, 2015When the director, Yukio Ninagawa, was a small boy he was struck by the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History. In Murikama's book, Ninagawa found the perfect use for dioramas in theatre. Ninagama writes that this tale has intimate detail in scenes as well as dynamic narrative scale. On stage, the 'dioramas' move fluidly between scenes, which are enacted in one frame, but surrounded often by others.
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Partch's Delusion of Fury at Lincoln Center Front Page
Heiner Goebbels Expands the Experience
By: - Jul 25th, 2015The stage at City Center was beautifully packed with an array of instruments designed by Harry Partch, a modern American composer of original theatrical events. Classifying him as a composer of concert music is, as Partch said, as foolish as saying he is a kangaroo. The brilliant director Heiner Goebbels expands the Partch experience with set objects and lighting. Here is the future of American musical production conceived over a half century ago.
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Jarry's Ubu Roi by Cheek by Jowl Front Page
Lincoln Center Festival Presents a Classic
By: - Jul 23rd, 2015Guess who's coming to dinner? Turns out Pere and Mere Ubu and their coterie of political acquaintances. Cheek by Jowl embeds the Jarry play at a dinner party. We can not decipher the dinner table conversation, but surely it is the same subject as the century-old play that is fresh and even futuristic. Here we see war, and regicide. Czars are toppled and Ukraine and Lithuania are in the news. Gold is hidden away in beneficial accounts. Plus ca change, plus ca la meme chose.
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Daphne with The Cleveland Orchestra Front Page
Welser-Möst Realizes the First of the Last Great Works of Strauss
By: - Jul 19th, 2015Daphne, a one act opera, is more tone poem than drama. Each character has a signature in notes. Particularly Daphne, Apollo and Leukippos are shaped and defined by Strauss. Strauss' new librettist Joseph Gregor finally produced a satisfactory text with a lot of help from Strauss' friends. Daphne was Pauline, Strauss' wife, favorite. A noted soprano in her own right, Pauline recognized the extraordinary musical character Strauss created for sopranos. Regine Hangler took full advantage.
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The Cleveland Orchestra at Avery Fisher Hall Front Page
Welser-Möst Conducts Messiaen and Dvorák
By: - Jul 16th, 2015Welser-Möst hid behind Tristan and Iseult in Vienna and Salome at Carnegie, two terrific opera productions he conducted. The continuity of the performance he draws from the elegant Cleveland Orchestra, weaving together an unusual whole, swoops the listener into the entire work without a breath, but with infinite attention to dynamic detail. It is a remarkable and uplifting experience to hear orchestral works as Welser-Möst designs them. Orchestra members are willing and more than up to the exciting task.
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Yarn/Wire at the Lincoln Center Festival Front Page
World Premieres by Murail, Misato Mochizuki, Raphaël Cendo
By: - Jul 15th, 2015When is sound music? When is noise music? These are questions asked by Yarn/Wire, a quartet of two pianists and two percussionists. We are reminded first and foremost that the piano is a percussion instrument. The excitement begins with this idea and floats out...forever.
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912Oz by Lloyd Pace at NY's Sanctuary Front Page
Katrin Hilbe Directs a Timeless Moment
By: - Jul 09th, 20159/11 is a tempting topic for playwrights and novelists who want to dig deeper into its impact. Lloyd Pace bores into the hearts and spirits of two survivors who are in the grips of the Big Events long after the rubble is cleared and New York starts to recover. In nooks and crannies of the darting words that erupt, we feel some of the intense, lasting impact. Brilliantly directed by Katrin Hilbe and staged with unusual simplicity and power.
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Les Troyens by San Francisco Opera Front Page
Stunning Performances by Antonacci, Graham and Hymel
By: - Jul 02nd, 2015The Trojan horse's head is 23 feet tall, the stage is packed with 18 principal singers, a chorus, dancers galore. Berlioz is perfumed with madness and desire. It is grand opera at its best in San Francisco: Les Troyens.
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Two Women at the San Francisco Opera Front Page
Anna Caterina Antonacci, a Singing Sophia Loren in Marco Tutino's Opera
By: - Jul 01st, 2015San Francisco Opera commissioned this work by an Italian composer Marco Tutino and puts on a terrific production. The set brilliantly reveals small human activities as an insert in the larger world picture. Often two dramas are taking place against the background of war. The beautiful score of Marco Tutino suits the story and provides ample opportunities to display the talents of the principals.
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Beckett's Happy Days is Here Again at the Flea Front Page
Brooke Adams and Tony Shalhoub Capture the Absurdity
By: - Jun 25th, 2015This production was a smash hit in Pasadena before it arrived at the Flea in New York and why is very clear: Brooke Adams gives a tour de force performance as Winnie, sinking into the earth with a broad grin. Her husband Tony Shalhoud is Willie: farting, eating goobers, but loving all the time..
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Petrenko to Berlin Philharmonic Front Page
Boston Breathes a Sigh of Relief
By: - Jun 22nd, 2015Andris Nelsons' name has whirled in the air around Berlin. He succeeded Sir Simon Rattle at Birmingham and it is Rattle who is stepping down in Berlin. Nelsons was a natural choice. The orchestra made its announcement today: Kirill Petrenko is their man. Recently he has triumphed at the Munich Opera where we heard his wonderful Lulu.
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Season Finale: Schubert and Beethoven Trios Front Page
Year-End Wrap up at the Rosen Salon
By: - Jun 21st, 2015Music salons at Joseph and Christina Rosen's are a treat. Over the course of a season, you can hear up and coming pianists, singers, and contemporary composers. The warhorses of music sound fresh and inviting. Only one of the pleasures of an evening is hearing Joe Rosen perform on the clarinet.
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Heisenberg with Mary Louise Parker Front Page
Simon Stephens Brings Quantum Entanglement to Life
By: - Jun 20th, 2015Heisenberg is a dashing new play by the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog, a hit on Broadway. His new play is more complete and satisfying, although its subject might disturb people who need predictability and order. Certainly Mary Louise Parker doesn't, as she loosey-goosey's through her life. Don't be put off by hints of quantum physics in the title. The play is uproarious and the best take on a May-December romance you'll see. It begins with a kiss, passes through the usual, and ends with indeterminacy.
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