Alma Mahler was a witty socialite with an appetite for sex and an eye for talent. By early adulthood, she had become a prolific composer. More than anything, she aspired to be Great, with a capital G. But Alma’s claim to fame, so eloquently outlined in her obituaries, is the long list of geniuses with […]
Category: Opinion
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The Case for a New Music Theater
I. “You Want to Stop Listening” 1996, Bregenz Festival. The semi-staged world premiere of my opera “Nacht” on texts by Friedrich Hölderlin. The journalist Reinhard Kager predicted that the work would have a great future. Looking back, I understand why. Thanks to the spare scenic means (different plot strands were illuminated using different kinds of […]
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Argumentum Ad Antiquitatem
In 1998, The New Yorker jazz critic Whitney Balliett predicted with remarkable prescience the future creations of Wynton Marsalis. Following “Blood on the Fields,” Marsalis’s jazz oratorio which, to Balliett’s surprise, won a Pulitzer Prize for Music that year, he wondered what might be next for the trumpeter and composer: “Perhaps Marsalis will write a […]
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On and Off the Menu
No, I didn’t attend any of the 11 concerts—four orchestral and seven chamber music—given by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra during its residency in Shanghai at the end of June. Dubbed the orchestra’s “first residency” in China by the press and the China Shanghai International Arts Festival (CSIAF) which hosted the orchestra, around 135 musicians and […]
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John McWhorter Has Nothing to Say (And He’s Saying It)
“Everybody’s so angry right now that nobody can listen or talk to anybody else,” Salman Rushdie said earlier this week in an interview with Jon Stewart. “And what’s more, we also believe that being offended is a sufficient reason for attacking something.… And if you go down that road, then we can’t talk to each […]
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Music to Not Listen to Music to
On March 10, 1969, Philip Glass was performing his piano piece “Two Pages” at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam when an audience member rushed onto the stage. “The next thing I knew,” Glass recounts in his memoir, “he was at the keyboard banging on the keys. Without thinking, acting on pure instinct, I belted him […]
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Ysaÿe No More
I don’t know if anybody has realized, but we’re in the middle of Hurricane Eugène. Since 2020, recordings of all or parts of Ysaÿe’s Six Sonatas (Op. 27) have been released by violinists including Ju-young Baek-Laurent Albrecht Breuninger-Thomas Bowes-Maxim Brilinsky-Anca Vasile Caraman-Elmira Darvarova-James Ehnes-Julia Fischer-David Grimal-Jeroen De Groot-Hilary Hahn-Kejia He-Kerson Leong-Jack Liebeck-Daniel Matejča-Alessandro Perpich-Solveig Steinthorsdottir-Yayoi […]
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Erotic Vocabularies
In his 1997 biography of Franz Schubert, late Austrian musicologist Ernst Hilmar points a microscope at the minutiae of the composer’s travels. If you have ever found yourself desperate to know the route Schubert took on his first journey from Vienna to visit a noble family in Želiezovce in the spring of 1818, Hilmar has […]
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Immoral Decisions
Update, 10/6/23: WCPE announced via its website that, “After careful deliberation, due consideration, and hearing from our supporters, listeners and the public, The Classical Station has decided to broadcast the entire 2023-2024 season of New York Metropolitan Opera.” Last month, Berlin’s newly-nomadic Komische Oper opened its first season in exile with Hans Werner Henze’s “Das […]
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The Problem with Peter
Rain is hardly a deterrent in Paris. It’s opening night for a new staging of the John Adams warhorse “Nixon in China,” and the imposing stone walls of the Opéra Bastille are framed by a quickly-brewing storm. Under trickling March skies, the house bears an uncanny resemblance to the military stronghold from which it gets […]