Susan Hall
Bio:
Recent Articles:
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John Zorn Celebrates 70 Front Page
Who Knew Classical Music Could be So Much Fun
By: - Sep 22nd, 2023One of the reasons John Zorn’s music attracts is that it’s so damn much fun. Leaping on and off the stage to introduce the numbers in his first of many 70th birthday celebrations at the Miller Theatre at Columbia, Zorn looked like he was going to last forever. And let’s hope he does.
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American Tenor Stephen Gould Dies at 61 Front Page
His Performances Were Always A Treat
By: - Sep 20th, 2023Berkshire Fine Arts was fortunate to hear Stephen Gould sing Parsifal in Bayreuth two years ago. He retired from Bayreuth this summer when he was diagnosed with incurable cancer.
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New Federal Theatre Opens Fall Season Front Page
Gala and Micki Grant Premiere Directed by Woodie King Jr.
By: - Sep 09th, 2023For over five decades, the New Federal Theatre has presented undiscovered talent like Denzel Washington, Debbie Allen, Phylicia Rashad, S. Epatha Merkerson, Issa Rae, La Tanya Richardson Jackson, Samuel L. Jackson, Chadwick Boseman, and Morgan Freeman in their first stage appearances. They premiered For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide. Led. by Woodie King Jr. and now Elizabeth Van Dyke, the New Federal Theatre is a national treasure.
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Adam Tendler and Cage at the Crypt Front Page
Andrew Ousley's Death Defying Death of Classical
By: - Sep 08th, 2023Leave it to the brilliant impresario Andrew Ousley and his music series, Death of Classical, to bring us an incredible and surprising evening of John Cage music. Before Cage moved on to the concepts of indeterminacy and chance, he composed more conventionally arced works for the prepared piano, in which screws were systematically and specifically applied to some strings in a grand piano, Cage clearly began in one place and ended up in another. Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano is a deliberate whole.
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Oppenheimer, the Film Front Page
No Answers for Creative Impulses of Great Scientists
By: - Sep 04th, 2023Oppenheimer, the film. Prepare your rotten tomatoes. The movie is loud, gray and one-dimensional.
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A Visit to Tippet Rise. Part II Front Page
A Special Staff for a Special Place
By: - Aug 27th, 2023Pete Hinmon and Lindsey Hinmon are Co-Directors of Tippet Rise Art Center. They are warm and deeply thoughtful, qualities you find in everyone at this working ranch. Qualities clearly treasured by the Halsteads, the couple creating this special art venue. The Halsteads have a knack for picking people.
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A Visit to Tippet Rise, Part I Front Page
Local is the Future of Music and Art
By: - Aug 22nd, 2023Tippet Rise is the passionate expression of Cathy Halstead, a painter, and Peter Halstead, a polymath (poet, pianist, photographer, and novelist) who met when they were very young and have lived like two peas in a pod ever since. Having assembled about 12,500 acres in southern Montana not far from Yellowstone National Park, they have taken cues from the natural surroundings to build concert halls, place site-specific architecture and sculptures and produce an annual summer music festival which is a model for the future.
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Tippet Rise Makes Music in Place Front Page
The Montana Ranch Home to Concerts and Sculpture
By: - Aug 09th, 2023Tippet Rise Art Center welcomes musicians and concertgoers for its eighth concert season, beginning August 18 and running through September 17. With more than 15 indoor and outdoor performances planned over five weekends, the season features a wide range of repertoire performed by artists who can be young trailblazers or legendary musicians. A highlight of this summer’s season is the debut of the new Wander series, which moves musicians and audiences between different works of art installed at the art center
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Is it Thursday Yet at La Jolla Playhouse Front Page
Jenn Freeman and Sonya Tayeh Join Forces in Dance and Drama
By: - Aug 01st, 2023"Is it Thursday Yet", playing at the La Jolla Playhouse, tells the story of dancer Jenn Freeman, who was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) when she was 33 years old. Using actual recordings of her therapy sessions and home videos Jenn’s father recorded as she grew up, the play is essentially a documentary of Jenn Freeman’s life from infancy to young adulthood. Neither Jenn nor her family knew she had ASD.
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Bach by Bike in Leipzig Front Page
A Trio Stops in the Summersaal
By: - Jul 31st, 2023An enthusiastic cyclist, violinist Marieke Neumann was the developer of the “Bach Bicycle Route” in central Germany, featuring guided tours to important locations from the composer’s life. Mezzo-soprano Anna-Luise Oppelt joins her for Bach by Bike to visit towns and cities where Johann Sebastian Bach lived and worked.
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Katrin Hilbe at Berlin Opera Academy Front Page
Acting Skills Now Fundamental
By: - Jul 28th, 2023he advent of Freudianism somehow severed the mind from the body, but over the past decades, there has been a return to the wisdom of late 19th century philosopher William James who saw the body and mind as deeply interrelated.
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Berkshire Opera Festival Brings in Boheme Front Page
Epic Love and Loss of Innocence Central to the Drama
By: - Jul 28th, 2023Berkshire Opera Festival continues its 2023 summer season with a mainstage production of La Bohème on August 26, August 29, and September 1 at The Colonial Theater in Pittsfield, MA. One of the most beloved operatic love stories of all time, La Bohème is based on Henri Murger's 1851 novel, Scènes de la vie de Bohème, which follows the lives of young people living in the Latin Quarter of Paris
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Marina Carr at the Abbey Theatre Front Page
Dublin Looks at Girl on the Altar
By: - Jul 23rd, 2023Marina Carr has joined Lady Augusta Gregory in the pantheon of playwrights pictured on the walls of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Her new play "Girl on the Altar" is playing now.
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Rhiannon Giddens Adds New Dimensions to Ojai Front Page
A New Silkroad Winds Across a Boundary-less World
By: - Jun 27th, 2023Rhiannon Giddens is leading new music which is both classical and popular. Her commitment to telling stories that have been buried and to showing us the world as it really is in music heralds anew age.
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Ojai Festival on Historic Journey Front Page
Rhiannon Giddens Programs All Music
By: - Jun 22nd, 2023At the 2023 Ojai music festival, Rhiannon Giddens, musical director, and a supremely talented group of musicians, presented a program that challenged the audience to take a musical journey with them around the world.
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A Sex-Positive Xerxes Front Page
Komische Oper's Ecstatic Production
By: - Jun 19th, 2023Handel’s Xerxes is a sex-positive party in this ecstatic production presented by Komische Oper. The theater itself is a beautiful little jewel box seating about 1200 people, an intimate setting appropriate to a production that would highlight intimacy.
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Experiments in Opera Presents Anthony Braxton Front Page
Feisty Opera Company Improvises at The Brick
By: - Jun 18th, 2023In 1999, Anthony Braxton caught the performance of an Improv group at Wesleyan College where he has taught for twenty-three years. Among its members was Lin Manuel Miranda. He picked a trooper and asked him to do an improvisation with him. The duo, collaborating on compositions 279 to 283, was the inspiration for this funny, hip and moving improv designed by Experiments in Opera (EiO).
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Susan Rennie Subverts the Male Gaze Front Page
Artist's Work on View in Venice, California
By: - Jun 16th, 2023Long before the Brooklyn Museum discovered the notorious Hannah Gadsby of "Nanette" and engaged her services as a curator of Pablo Picasso, Susan Rennie was gripped by the idea that art most often was created by the male gaze.
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The Doctor at Park Avenue Armory Front Page
Is it Possible to Function in Fully Human Mode
By: - Jun 16th, 2023Arthur `Schnitzler's play "Professor Bernhardi" has been completely rewritten by director Robert Icke, who takes the action from 1900 Vienna to present-day Britain. Now called "The Doctor", it was a smash hit in London and is running until August 19th at the Park Avenue Armory in New York.
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Love All at the La Jolla Playhouse Front Page
Billie Jean King Wins This Match
By: - Jun 15th, 2023Love All, a new play by Anna Deavere Smith and directed by Marc Bruni, is running at the La Jolla Playhouse through July 2. 'Love all' is the score of a tennis match before it starts. It is a word used often during the course of a game. It means zero. And that is what athletes were making when Billie Jean Moffit (later King) started playing tennis. She also loved men and women.
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Rhiannon Giddens Curates Ojai. Part I Front Page
Spiritual and Historic Journey
By: - Jun 13th, 2023Rhiannon Giddens curated the Ojai Music Festival this year. She often sings “I shall not be moved.” And yet, in the strong force you feel in her wake, you know and feel she is moving and you are moved. Giddens is fond of the double and triple entendre. For four days we are sailing with her and we are also in her wake.
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Lucia di Lammermoor at Deutsch Opera Front Page
One of Three Choices
By: - Jun 08th, 2023A charming throwback, or, The High School Musical version, of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor at Deutsch Oper, Berlin
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Curtis Stewart Erupts at Merkin Hall Front Page
Kaufman Music Center Produces Ecstatic Music
By: - Jun 04th, 2023Curtis Stewart is a man for all seasons. He took over Merkin Hall at the Kaufman Center this week. When you hear him, you know that Nietzsche was right: without music, life would be a mistake.
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Flying Dutchman Transports at the Met Opera Front Page
Francois Girard in Top Form as Producer
By: - May 31st, 2023The new Flying Dutchman at the Metropolitan Opera transports. Grounded shortly after its debut as the pandemic erupted in March of 2020, the cast has changed. Like many of the Met's new productions, singing is excellent across the board and gives great pleasure.
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Rhiannon Giddens Directs at Ojai Front Page
Giddens Tells The Whole Story
By: - May 29th, 2023Each year at the Ojai Festival in California a different Music Director is given the freedom and the resources to imagine four days of musical brainstorming. Ojai’s signature blend of an enchanted setting and an audience voracious in its appetite for challenge and discovery has inspired a distinguished series of musical innovators—from Pierre Boulez, Aaron Copland, and Igor Stravinsky and Jeremy Denk, Dawn Upshaw and Barbara Hannigan. John Adams has directed twice.
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