Condemned to Music

Damn, damn, damn! I was all set to go on Travelocity to book a flight to Freiburg, Germany when this poster for Wozzeck on Ice! arrived in my inbox this morning. Imagine: A genre normally associated with the lightest of light children's entertainment applied to a thoroughly adult, furrow-browed opera.  Imagine the most graceful and circular of the athletic arts being the frame for Alban Berg's incredibly angular music. With ice skates, singers could make entrances and exits with cinematic speed. They would also get sick more often. … [Read more...]

When Audra McDonald called them an opera power couple on the recent PBS broadcast of the Richard Tucker Music Foundation Gala, I broke out laughing. Not at McDonald, and not because she was inaccurate: Soprano Ailyn Perez and tenor Stephen Costello fit the definition – both are headed toward the top of the opera profession if they aren't there already – but they don't fit the part, which was delightfully apparent in odd, peripheral moments on the telecast (still available for streaming here). Aren't power couples supposed to be … [Read more...]

Though I never encountered Maria Callas in person, I heard Galina Vishnevskaya in recital shortly after her 1974 emigration from the Soviet Union - and I came to understand how music, words and character can wholly inhabit a human being and come out as a single expressive entity of overwhelming power and bottomless humanity. The city was Indianapolis, not a hotbed of Vishnevskaya fans; the recital was part of a hastily arranged series of Mstislav Rostropovich concerts that had him guest conducting the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. Having … [Read more...]

"There's enough beauty in the world," declared David Lang in a recklessly unguarded moment prior to the New York premiere of his new, hour-long work love fail,  written for the vocal quartet Anonymous 4. But what does the world need if not beauty? What this singular composer is ready to supply, though, seems to be something for which the right words haven't been invented. How appropriate to an artist who is constantly challenging conventional vocabularies to the breaking point. This new work, premiered in June in New Haven and with a … [Read more...]

November snow was still piled up on the foot path of the Brooklyn Bridge one recent Friday, but not enough to stop a pair of guys from stomping through the slush on a midnight, across-the-bridge run, for which they were both, incongruously in 30-degree weather, shirtless. The rules are up in the air now.  Weather events that once seemed specific to different seasons (like the dead of winter) and distant states (like Florida) are appearing in anything but their proper places and turning New York City, among other locales, upside down. At … [Read more...]

Time and again in the weeks since the Metropolitan Opera opening of The Tempest, post-concert gatherings longer than five minutes soon get round to the question, muttered semi-intelligibly with a vague air of shame. “What did you think of The Tempest”? One British critic had said that this, Thomas Adès's second opera, was the most important British event of its kind since Peter Grimes. Nearly all the New York critics - including the important ones - had high praise. Oh dear. Does this mean that our brains are boiled if we didn't … [Read more...]

Reprinted from the Philadelphia Inquirer, first published on Nov. 8. For the time being, Elliott Carter, who died Monday in New York, will be known as the composer who worked the longest. Well into his 104th year, he composed intricately and conscientiously, each piece seeming to be all that it could be, with little decline in inspiration. Of course he did. He frankly didn't know what else to do with himself. "I don't walk well. My eyesight is peculiar. But I don't feel as though I'm an old person in the way I think," the hearty, … [Read more...]

“Had the election gone the other way,” said Peter Yarrow, formerly of Peter Paul and Mary, the evening would’ve felt very different. As it was, the Nov. 9th benefit concert for the environmental Clearwater foundation at New York City's Symphony Space was a quirky, gloriously whacked tribal reunion of nearly every lefty folksinger you ever admired but feared was dead. You see, the good don’t always die young. Pete Seeger, age 93, came out of retirement to sing “Turn Turn Turn,” having rediscovered and dusted off some five verses … [Read more...]

  The scene was Carnegie Hall in the wake of a snow storm, roughly a decade ago. The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra under James Levine had just played a knockout performance of Carter's Variations for Orchestra. Months before, I had interview Carter in his Greenwich Village apartment a few weeks after the death of his wife. As one can imagine, he didn't look so well. I worried that the still-earthy, hearty, unpretentious Carter would die soon, as so often happens when the elderly lose a longtime spouse. He related that he'd only … [Read more...]

Phil Kline’s far-flung output is like a family with many parents. While many composers find a creative vein and mine it for as long as possible, Kline is more conceptually similar to Stephen Sondheim or Igor Stravinsky, establishing stylistic and emotional perimeters for each new work and creating a language that best inhabits it. Out Cold, his new 10-song cycle I heard Oct. 26 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music performed by singer Theo Bleckmann and the ACME ensemble, was a bigger departure than usual, if only because his tendency toward … [Read more...]