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 […]
Author Archives: Benjamin Poore
Posted inInterview
The Reverse Conductor
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 […]
Posted inReport
Inhabiting the Curve
Cate Blanchett isn’t the only conductor in Todd Field’s “Tár” (2022). There is her predecessor at the Berlin Philharmonic, Andris, and the Gilbert Kaplan cipher Eliot (Mark Strong). There are also two assistant conductors: the aspirant Francesca Lentini (Noémie Merlant), who hopes to take the assistant position at the Berlin Phil, and the hapless Sebastian […]
Posted inPlaylist
The Best Opening Chords in Classical Music
Some pieces of music burst into life with feats of virtuosic daring; others rumble up from the bowels of the earth; some loom over you hieratically. Many beginnings are defined by some brilliant melodic gesture: Strauss’s “Don Juan,” for instance, scales the orchestra with a kind of priapic triumph. As a miserable year comes to […]
Posted inUncategorized
The Sugar in the Tea
“We want to see your faces!” It’s not an unusual thing to hear in a choir rehearsal. Getting your head out of the score to look at conductor and public works musical wonders. But it had a sharper quality when I heard Rob Gildon say it in a workshop run by Streetwise Opera at the […]
Posted inEssay
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: […]
Posted inReview
Indeterminate Openness
As music director of the Vienna State Opera and then (briefly) of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, Gustav Mahler was steeped in the form. Despite this, he never wrote an opera. The closest Mahler came is probably the hour-long finale of the Eighth Symphony, which sets the final scene from Part Two of Goethe’s “Faust.” The […]
Posted inPlaylist
A March Madness Playlist
“What if we did a playlist of 32 musical marches to tie in with March Madness?” asked one VAN editor who definitely understands sportsball and did not have to google how many teams are in a bracket (or when March Madness takes place). As classical-music-cartoonish as the idea sounded, it did get us thinking about […]
Posted inEssay
Wood Made Flesh
“If Marina Abramovic had been a violinist, she would’ve been drawn to” Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber’s “Rosary” or “Mystery” Sonatas for violin and continuo, violinist Daniel Pioro tells me. With organist James McVinnie, Pioro performs the complete “Rosary” Sonatas at London’s Southbank Centre on January 22. The cycle is spread across three performances in […]
Posted inPlaylist
An English National Opera playlist
English National Opera: Coming to an as-yet-undisclosed location near you. Arts Council England’s decision to strip ENO of its subsidy in the latest round of funding has been a shock to the arts ecosystem in the UK. As Hugh Morris wrote in VAN last week, the approach of ACE appears to be: Fuck around and […]