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 […]
Category: Essay
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A Chained Man’s Bruise
“You get this idea of someone knowing that something is not right,” experimental vocalist Elaine Mitchener says of Peter Maxwell Davies’s “Eight Songs for a Mad King.” “It’s askew. You know the headache you have when you have a migraine—you can’t actually see something in front of the eye? That’s how I feel with this: […]
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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 […]
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A Private Place of Joy
I love that moment when the lights in the concert hall dim. The audience fades away, and all I see is the Steinway in front of me. Above the keys, in the black glow of the fallboard, I see the reflection of my fingers, poised for the dance. Everything is white and black, symmetrical and […]
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Denazifying “Carmina Burana”
The legacies of Wagner and Nietzsche, German geniuses long dead before the advent of the Nazi scourge, still buckle under the taint. Festival destinations like Bayreuth and Oberammergau (home of the Passion Play) that long eluded denazification have, albeit only recently, embraced an ethos of reform. While these people and places were rightly seen as […]
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In For a Pound
09:31 11/2/2022 It’s a sunny, fall day in Lyon, and an email appears reminding me that I am young. To be young in the opera world is to enter a transient realm, between the strictly policed age brackets of young artist programs, and an audience demographic fetishized by arts marketers; where young can mean anything […]
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“I Don’t Know Why I’m Angry, I’m Angry, I’m Angry…”
“Almost one year since the escalation of the war in Ukraine, a generation of children has experienced 12 months of violence, fear, loss, and tragedy,” wrote the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on February 21. According to the organization’s most recent statistics, at least 438 children have been killed by acts of war, with 842 […]
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Out of the Woods
In the studios at Maida Vale, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and BBC Singers are warming up for a world premiere recording. It’s an opera that once graced the stages of Covent Garden in London, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and the Berlin State Opera. But the piece has gone without a professional performance for […]
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Quarter Rest with Fermata
Quarter Rest with Fermatafor Richard R. Schantz On this dayin the Weih-nocturne glowof this roomful of rhombicuboctahedronsthe real augmented by reflection time isn’t ordinary. Right on cue(you always said to anticipate entrances in light of narrative)there you areby your crystal fountain, posing unanswered questionsd’arte, d’amoreexposition, disclo(the)sure(your Sprechstimme unequivocalstill strictly, stubbornly non-rhotic). You extend, generouslyarsis, thesisup and down, […]
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Retrospection for a Ragtime King
Joplin’s was a curious story. His compositions became more and more intricate, until they were almost jazz Bach.— Music publisher Edward B. Marks, 1934 In 1991, when I was eight years old, I found a simplified version of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” and relished playing it for most of the year that I was in […]