On Monday, the Staatsoper Berlin announced its 2019-20 program. Aside from a few potential highlights—René Jacobs leading Scarlatti and a new ballet by Georg Friedrich Haas—the programming reads like a parody of a conservative orchestra season, featuring yet another Beethoven cycle, Brahms cycle, and “Ring.” The soloists are of high quality, but belong firmly to […]
Category: Report
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The Titan’s Shadow
Daniel Barenboim is a great musician and humanist. So why are so many people afraid of him?
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“Oh Yeah, He Does That”
As Laura* was beginning a career in artist management at a major London agency, she had to balance the new, 24-hour commitment with a personal issue: being stalked online by the friend of a friend. When she eventually went to the police, they told her to remove photos from social media and keep a “quiet” […]
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Sonic Eviction
On August 17, Germany’s state-owned railway company Deutsche Bahn announced the launch of a new initiative that aimed to sonically evict “homeless people and drug users” at its Hermannstraße station, a story that caught the attention of virtually every news outlet in Germany, as well as the New York Times. (The project has since been […]
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Rules of Engagement
In Wieland Hoban’s composition “Hora’ot Pticha Be’esh (Rules of Engagement I),” from 2013-14, we hear distorted microtones, low glissandi, plucking, instrumental squealing. This music accompanies testimony by a Sergeant First Class in the Armored Corps of the Israeli Defense Forces during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, in the winter of 2008-9. The soldier speaks in […]
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Simon Said
Simon Rattle grits his teeth and flares his nostrils. He raises his silver eyebrows, opens his mouth in vowel shapes, closes his eyes again in an ecstatic expression, bounces his baton off the air. These are his ways of expressing how the music makes him feel. They are also the tics that bother some of […]
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Schism Symphony
In my adopted home of Berlin, it’s possible to cycle past the Konzerthaus, the Staatsoper, the Komische Oper and the Philharmonie in the space of around 10 minutes, 15 if you’re pedaling flaneur-style. On a warm weekend, tourists drift down Unter den Linden, a large boulevard leading to the Brandenburg Gate, like schools of fish; […]
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Cheap Luxury
There are some events that are embarrassing to be seen at; then there are others where you are embarrassed for the other people who show up. Events such as “BraVo,” the awards ceremony for international pop music and classical art, which took place for the first time in early March in Moscow, and whose name […]
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Tonefoil Hat, Episode 5
Get started with Tonefoil Hat here. In a 2016 New Yorker article, Patrick Radden Keefe reported on a unit of the London Metropolitan Police he termed “super-recognizers.” These police officers have the ability to see a face once and then recognize it again among millions of others, and they comb vast quantities of CCTV footage, […]
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Tonefoil Hat Finale
Get started with Tonefoil Hat here. I’m giving up. The last time I made any progress with David Lucas Burge’s Perfect Pitch Ear Training SuperCourse was June 12—almost a month ago. My ear training practice sessions now end after five minutes. I’ve started hurling insults at my microphone. Like the main character in Beckett’s play […]