Posted inInterview

Open Garten

Walter Zimmermann’s music has a rare combination of stasis and flow. It wanders without being lost. It communicates calm curiosity and curious calm. Many composers have written music about nature, but Zimmermann’s is one of the few musics that seems as if nature itself could have created it.  In April, he turned 75. On Friday, […]

Posted inReview

A Refusal of Habit

Putting 50 pianos in a room creates a sense of occasion. On Saturday, I heard Georg Friedrich Haas’s “11.000 Saiten” (“11,000 Strings”), for 50 uprights tuned in ascending intervals of two cents and the contemporary music ensemble Klangforum Wien, at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam. Although the piece premiered in August 2023 in Bolzano, Italy, […]

Posted inInterview

Reacting in a Continuum

On July 12, the label BMOP/sound of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project will release its 100th recording. BMOP—pronounced “BE-mop”—was founded in 1996 by conductor Gil Rose, and has since filled an essential gap in Boston’s classical music scene, performing new and new-ish music between the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s rarified renditions of canonical repertoire, new-music gigs […]

Posted inEssay

Kafka’s Coloratura

To read Franz Kafka’s last short story “Josephine, the Songstress or The Mouse Folk” is to recognize the reflection better the dirtier the glass. The subject of the story is an artist and the creatures in whose midst she makes her art. Her name is Josephine. She is a singer. Or is she? Josephine’s folk […]

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A Bit More Darkness

The conductor and singer Barbara Hannigan, 53, is possessed of such irrevocable musicianship and presence that, during her May 9 recital of works by Messiaen and John Zorn at the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, with the pianist Bertrand Chamayou, I caught myself in the casual assumption that she was immortal, like Messiaen’s Catholic God […]

Posted inBreaking

Report Raises Allegations of Sexual Misconduct Against François-Xavier Roth

A story published today by legendary French investigative magazine Le Canard enchaîné raises allegations of sexual harassment against conductor François-Xavier Roth.  Roth, 52, is a renowned musician and performer, and received France’s highest honor, the Chevalier degree of the Order of the Légion d’honneur, in 2017. In 2003, he founded the period instrument orchestra Les […]

Posted inInterview

Fluid Like Water

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, […]