“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 […]
Category: News
Posted inBreaking
Queer, Dangerous, Exciting
James Jorden, who died earlier this week at 69, is almost certainly one of the most influential people in my life who I never met. In 1994, frustrated with his own floundering career as a stage director, and by the sorry state of both opera writing (overly academic guff or reformatted press releases) and opera […]
Posted inBreaking
The Politics of D Major
Like a panel of elementary-school teachers, music critics weren’t mad—just disappointed yesterday. That was when the Staatsoper Unter den Linden announced that conductor Christian Thielemann would replace Daniel Barenboim as music director starting with the 2024-25 season. Stern and badly-spelled I expected better of yous rang out across the land, directed at the city’s center-right […]
Posted inBreaking
Did John Eliot Gardiner Punch a Singer?
Update The week after this article was published, a spokesperson for John Eliot Gardiner announced that he had taken the decision to withdraw from all engagements until next year. Gardiner will be “focussing on his mental health while engaging in a course of counselling,” they said.“I am taking a step back in order to get […]
Posted inReport
Clouds, Unmoving
Though the worst of the downpours have retreated for now, the sky is hardly Stanford blue for classical musicians in the UK. Recently, there has been retaliation to the difficulties imposed by the toxic cocktail of inflation, Brexit, COVID aftershocks and funding cuts to institutions: yesterday, the Royal Opera House orchestra voted overwhelmingly in favor […]
Posted inBreaking
Predatory Environments
Robert Beaser has been fired from his position on the Juilliard School’s composition faculty after an investigation by the law firm Potter & Murdock found Beaser had “interfered with individuals’ academic work,” engaged in “an unreported relationship” in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and “repeatedly misrepresented facts about his actions.” The school announced this […]
Posted inBreaking
Nonsense
I don’t know what’s more unforgivable: that conductor and long-serving Bard president Leon Botstein accepted money from Jeffrey Epstein, or that he put me in the position of agreeing with American conservative outrage-monger Dinesh D’Souza. “He is ideologically unpredictable, even eccentric,” D’Souza was quoted as saying of Botstein in a 1992 New York Times profile […]
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An Imperfect Cassandra
For a while, it seemed like the lasting legacy of oboist and Mozart in the Jungle author Blair Tindall, whose April 12 death was confirmed late last week, would be that she had a short-lived, invalid marriage to Bill Nye that ended with the Science Guy taking out a restraining order against her. According to […]
Posted inBreaking
1,000 Symphonies In Your Pocket
There’s faint live music as I walk into Battersea Power Station. Around the corner from Apple’s giant, glass-fronted reception area, a man is performing an extremely committed rendition of Modest Mussorgsky’s “The Great Gate of Kyiv” on a public piano to a crowd of exactly three people, in the middle of an enormous shopping center. […]
Posted inReport
Pay to Sing
“When I was at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, I was so startled that all the singers were running around and doing anything other than what I could see seems necessary,” Mark Sampson, a bass and the founder and artistic director of the Berlin Opera Academy (BOA), tells me. “And they were too […]