Dazzlingly abstruse and brimming over with surreal touches, “The Mother of Us All,” an opera with music by Virgil Thomson and a libretto by Gertrude Stein, is an idiosyncratic choice for an experiment in community building in Hudson, New York. The work tells the story of Susan B. Anthony, or something like it. At one […]
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Two Sides of a Concert, Part I
Naively in retrospect, I came to the Deutsche Oper’s recent production of “Elektra” with an expectation that its reception would be mostly positive. The work is a staple of German opera, staged at a respected German opera house, seasonally appropriate with blood and gore in October, and featuring a world-renowned Wagnerian soprano, Catherine Foster, in […]
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Two Sides Of A Concert, Part III
I rang in the new year at the San Francisco Symphony, interviewing audience members about the evening’s entertainment: Seth MacFarlane. The creator of the popular TV series “Family Guy” and “The Orville,” among others, MacFarlane is also a baritone. On December 31, he sang jazz standards and Broadway numbers under the direction of Edwin Outwater. […]
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Two Sides Of A Concert, Part II
The new John Adams opera “Girls of the Golden West” depicts the Gold Rush, an iconic moment in California history when people of different backgrounds suddenly came to live in the same place. With Adams, director Peter Sellars constructed much of the libretto from the letters of Louise Clappe, an educated woman who wrote under […]
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When Is The Real Reopening?
And so, at long last, the Staatsoper Unter den Linden has reopened its doors to the public, its resident company’s long exile—seven years—in Charlottenburg’s Schillertheater over. It will close again at the end of the week, to re-reopen, as it were, in December, some final work to do, but let us not worry too much […]
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Disappearing Act
The rarely performed music of Horatiu Radulescu, the iconoclastic Romanian composer and self-described founder of spectralism, will be at the center of an ambitious upcoming three-day festival at Acker Stadt Palast in Berlin on October 19-21. Organized by Iranian composer and conductor Arash Yazdani and his Ensemble for New Music Tallinn (ENMT) in honor of […]
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Nestled
Heinz Holliger sits on the edge of his seat, moving his hands knowingly to the atonal wanderings of Frédérique Cambreling’s harp. His face cycles between anticipation, excitement, and a little thrilled relief. Holliger is watching the world premiere of the full version of his Partita No. 2 for Harp, which is stretching both the limits […]
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Playing God With Sound
In film and childhood memories, concert halls darken and the audience murmurs. They begin exerting force on you long before the first note is played. So why can watching a live orchestra—with its reverent circumstance—feel a little like sitting in an elaborate wedding cake or complicated wicker-basket? Maybe it’s because getting acoustic music to fill […]
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Beckmesser’s Dream
A pogrom unfolds on the streets of Nuremberg. It’s the end of Act II of Barrie Kosky’s new production of “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” at the Bayreuth Festival. Elsewhere in the piece, Hans Sachs sings that “all poems and verse are just the interpretation of dreams.” In some sense this production represents Beckmesser’s dream, or […]
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Can Cis Men Write Trans Opera?
“I am a human; nothing that is human is alien to me.” Composer Robert Paterson cites this line from the Roman playwright Terence in defense of his choice, along with librettist David Cote, to write an opera with characters that don’t share his demographic background. “I think there’s too much of that these days,” Paterson […]