The reality outside the virtual reality is this: a blindingly sunny pre-fall day on Glasgow’s South Side gives way to a dark, almost bare studio in Offline (formerly Glasgow Artists’ Moving Image Studios). The room is divided into two halves, each with a square, slightly soft, and pleasingly bumpy fabric covering, and a stool for […]

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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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In England, the summer country house opera season is winding up. Dinner jackets fly south to the dry cleaner; wicker picnic hampers bed down to hibernate until the spring.  Although there are summer opera festivals all over the world, the country house phenomenon is almost unique to the British: few other countries give such primacy […]

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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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In 2022, I sang Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem” at the Royal Albert Hall. During the performance a spotlit figure caught my eye, moving his hands dynamically and expressively with the musical flow, but who was neither a conductor, nor a singer, nor an instrumentalist. That figure was Paul Whittaker: a Deaf musician who uses British […]

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Can you name a monumental four-opera series that brings together an extended, related cast of characters involved in mysterious and spiritual quests? How about a Great American Novel? Now, how about an artist who created both?   The answer is the great American composer Robert Ashley, who died in 2014 just shy of his 84th birthday, […]

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The curtain opens on Mozart’s “La clemenza di Tito.” On stage is a raging Vitellia: wannabe empress, scorned daughter, forgotten royalty. “He could have at least chosen a rival worthy of me,” she spits, of reigning emperor Tito. “Instead, he prefers a barbarian and an exile to me, a queen!”  Vitellia’s father was the emperor […]

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Calixto Bieito is responsible for some of the most indelible images in recent memory on the European opera stage. I’ll never forget his version of “Die Entführung aus dem Serail” at the Komische Oper Berlin. Mozart’s music and the contemporary brothel setting rubbed off unsettlingly on one another—the composition acquired a layer of mysterious grime, […]

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It’s that time of year again: The Eurovision Song Contest is just around the corner, coming to grace (or haunt) television screens across Europe and beyond on May 11. What began as an experiment in transnational broadcasting in 1956 has since become a global cultural phenomenon in which camp and geopolitics intertwine. Eurovision, now in […]

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In October 2018, Jamal Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and never came out. A journalist for The Washington Post and Middle East Eye who was fiercely critical of his country’s regime, Khashoggi was ambushed by a 15-man Saudi hit team; he was suffocated to death and his body was dismembered with a bone […]

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