In the autumn of 2021, neatly coinciding with the release of her latest album “Amata dalle Tenebre,” Russian soprano Anna Netrebko published her first (cook)book, the German-language Der Geschmack meines Lebens (“The Taste of My Life”). Upon discovering this a few weeks ago, our only course of action was to throw multiple-course Anna Netrebko-themed dinner […]
Category: Rankings & Roundups
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Every Classical Singer’s Christmas Album, Ranked
I love Christmas: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever, about that. The register of my joy at this time of the year is secured by the glühwein, the television specials, the tree markets, and the carols. I love Christmas like Kanye loves Kanye. Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of […]
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Every Schubert Song, Ranked
In her 2019 review-cum-retrospective of John Updike, writer Patricia Lockwood noted that her assignment felt “like a flamboyant completist stunt, like one of those Buzzfeed articles where someone ranks every episode of the original Care Bears cartoons.” I would like to situate this ranking of every Schubert song in the same hallowed pantheon as the […]
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Piano Entanglements
In the spring, while stuck at home avoiding the coronavirus, I read Lea Singer’s forthcoming novel, The Piano Student, which tells the story of Vladimir Horowitz’s affair with a 23-year-old male protege, Nico Kauffman. Drawing from Horowitz’s actual letters to Kauffman, Singer depicts a forbidden relationship in which Horowitz vacillates between ardently declaring his love […]
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Every Scarlatti Sonata, Ranked
Domenico Scarlatti (1685–1757) wrote a lot of Sonatas. Fair enough: what else was there to do all day before Twitter was invented? Listening to all these pieces in 2020 proved another challenge. I’ll make no claim to have heard each work in monkish concentration, and I make no guarantees for the correctness of my observations. […]
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Keyboard Warriors
Stravinsky puts it pithily enough: Music “expresses nothing outside of itself.” It’s a dictum that puts critics like me on the back foot, accusing us of peddling only a pale and inadequate imitation of the thing itself. Those who can’t, write. But it also describes a deeper sense of music as incommensurable, elevated by thinkers […]
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Sonic Distancing
In the last 10 years or so, countless theories have surfaced to describe what ails classical music’s concert halls. Is it the stuffy architecture; the ban on beverages; the hushers and passive-aggressive insiders; or the (crumbling) bans on social media use that turn off many potential visitors, especially those who are young and non-white? The […]
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Beethoven’s 10 Worst Pieces, Ranked
I like Beethoven. After all, he is VAN’s namesake. I’ll admit to wildly conducting along with the Fifth, in my bedroom, at age 13—the first classical music I ever loved. But one of the things that makes Beethoven so likable is the uneven quality of his work. No perfectionist, you can absolutely tell when he […]
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The Top 7 Clichéd Gestures of Opera
Opera is a remarkably durable art. Sitting through “Parsifal” in 100 degree heat at Bayreuth recently, and hearing the couple behind me making chitchat during the final chord, I was surprised to notice that I still was transported by the work. But if anything threatens to break the spell, it’s the stereotypical operatic gestures that […]
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#bassic
If a musician studies a score and doesn’t post about it on social media, does it still count? No point in risking it, which is why the VAN social media channels see a steady flow of visually pleasing, life-envy-inducing photographs of scores being studied. From carefully-placed pencils, symmetry or graceful asymmetry, to flat whites, whiskey, […]