One of the proudest moments of my life took place at the 2016 Opera News Awards. Seated at the Plaza Hotel for the annual gala, I realized Henry Kissinger’s table was cater-corner to mine. At one point, seeing him get up, I scurried out of my seat under the guise of going to the restroom. […]
Tag: Music & Politics
Posted inInterview
A Way to Remain Alive
In 2005, a Belgian NGO came to Ramallah with a truck full of musical instruments to donate to the city’s nonprofit music school, Al Kamandjati (“The Violinist”). One of the boys who helped to unload the violins, violas, cellos, double-basses, and guitars was 15-year-old Shehada Shalalda, who lived in the neighborhood. It was an innocuous […]
Posted inOpinion
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 […]
Posted inInterview
Where the Trees Are
Whether it’s Julius Eastman’s “Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan of Arc,” Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis,” or Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” listening to Davóne Tines sing is like watching rock climber Alexander Honnold free solo up El Capitan: You’re struck by the raw power and voltage of his stentorian […]
Posted inUncategorized
The Sugar in the Tea
“We want to see your faces!” It’s not an unusual thing to hear in a choir rehearsal. Getting your head out of the score to look at conductor and public works musical wonders. But it had a sharper quality when I heard Rob Gildon say it in a workshop run by Streetwise Opera at the […]
Posted inBreaking
“Classical Music Is Not the Easiest Thing at This Time”
“Since the war started, this is the first time I’m talking about my experience and about how I feel,” says Lia Perlov, the principal cellist of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra (IPO), at the beginning of our Zoom call on Tuesday. “I don’t even talk about this with my partner or my parents. Because it’s too […]
Posted inProfile
The Value of Normality
I The drive from Tbilisi airport to the Tsinandali Estate should take about two hours, but it’s a much swifter journey in the very early morning. We zoom serenely along the quiet highways, slowing only to swerve stray dogs who have wandered onto the road. Each swerve is a sudden lurch that jolts me out […]
Posted inReport
“I’m Willing to Commit the Crime of Music”
Icy silence is all that’s left of Afghanistan’s musical terrain. When the Taliban rose to power in 2021, accounts of immolating instruments and violent oppression of musicians foreshadowed censorship of virtually all forms of self-expression—an intimately harrowing circumstance for Afghan musicians. The Taliban rule of 1996–2001 was characterized by similarly strict censorship, including a wide […]
Posted inEssay
Wounded but Alive
KharkivMusicFest is both one of the newest and one of the largest classical music festivals in Ukraine. Founded in 2018, it opened with an ambitious program. Since then the festival has faced huge challenges—a pandemic, a war—yet has still managed to find ways of offering culture to people in Kharkiv. In 2022, I became artistic […]
Posted inEssay
First Canceled, then Celebrated
On May 2, 2023, Valery Gergiev turned 70. One week later, Russia celebrated Victory Day—a Soviet holdover holiday commemorating the country’s 1945 victory over National Socialism. Gergiev spent that day leading the Mariinsky Orchestra in the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, closing out the 22nd annual Moscow Easter Festival—a marathon of concerts (often two […]