Condemned to Music

Nobody should be surprised that Hans Werner Henze had a world premiere in Berlin  - Ouverture zu einem Theater - only days before he died on Oct. 27 in Dresden. He was unstoppable: Illness nearly killed him when he was between acts in the composition of his 2007 opera Phaedra - an experience that changed the flavor of the piece but certainly didn’t curtail it. Though other composers in his lifetime have been as industrious as Henze – Benjamin Britten, Elliott Carter – none of them logged so much musical mileage over such diverse … [Read more...]

Options have run out, but existence drags on anyway. Such is the dilemma dramatized in two new music-theater pieces, the recently premiered opera Dog Days by David T. Little (seen below), and the theatrical song cycle Out Cold by Phil Kline (which will be premiered Oct. 25-27 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, paired with his penetrating Zippo Songs, based on desperate texts by US soldiers in Vietnam). Both works are populated by people in extreme distress. Basic sustenance - sometimes emotional, sometimes physical - is in question. Dog … [Read more...]

La Poeme Harmonique, a France-based early-music group that I would get on an airplane to hear, has become an annual visitor to Columbia University’s Miller Theater, and this year, achieved a visibility milestone: Two full-house performances of its program Venezia. No doubt La Poeme Harmonique will soon take its place in New York alongside Les Arts Florissants as one of the brand names in early music, and in a market that lags considerably behind Europe, where some of the most interesting music making is happening among groups that find … [Read more...]

Is New York Times classical music critic Allan Kozinn being silenced with a reassignment as cultural reporter? Not if anybody plays their cards even remotely right. Rather than being muted, Kozinn could well be amplified with a larger, broader platform. As a longtime New York Times reader who believes that the publication's strength and quality can only help bolster the newspaper industry at large, I'm tentatively hopeful about Kozinn's reported release from the daily reviewing grind. When I go through a stretch of writing nothing but … [Read more...]

Not all Broadway babies of a certain age look or sound like Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin. Many should be so lucky. But an alternative pairing is holding forth at the near-Times Square cabaret 54 Below this week through Aug. 25: Faith Prince and Jason Graae in a joint concert titled The Prince and the Show Boy.  It reminds you how durable these two "certain age" talents are. If born in a previous era, they'd be in Broadway shows as constantly as Barbara Cook once was. And for years, Prince, in particular, was regularly on that landscape. … [Read more...]

The Central City Opera has survived Colorado’s gambling boom and now, as the town around it fades, is operating at a world-class standard – in what feels like the height of sociological incongruity. This summer’s production of The Turn of the Screw, Benjamin Britten’s elusive opera about children possessed by ghosts, took me deeper into the piece’s darker-than-dark heart more than any previous encounter – on a brilliantly sunny Wednesday afternoon while, outside, denizens of the lingering gambling trade were dropped off and … [Read more...]

The divine is insinuating itself into opera – and in doing so, is creating dramatic reversals of what certain kinds of music say and do. Though gods and goddesses were onstage almost exclusively in Baroque opera, everybody knew they were just us in disguise - and in the real world of church politics, they wouldn’t even rate the first stage of beatification, much less the canonization process that took poor Hildegard of Bingen something like 800 years to achieve. Last weekend at Princeton’s McCarter Theater, American Opera … [Read more...]

Evelyn Lear didn't need an active singing career to delight those around her. The long-retired, Brooklyn-born soprano, who died July 1 at age 86, had an all-too-short career as a lyric soprano with superb musical intelligence and considerable physical beauty. She set standards with her recordings of The Magic Flute, Wozzeck and Lulu, all on Deutsche Grammophon conducted by the formidable Karl Böhm. However, she never quite came back from a 1970s vocal crises, the evidence being the colorless, tentative singing in her 1976 recording of Der … [Read more...]

The brash young composer Nico Muhly – much to the surprise of many but probably not to himself – turned out to be right. When his opera Dark Sisters was premiered in New York City in November, many believed the ever prolific Muhly (yes, even more prolific than his longtime employer Philip Glass) had rushed through the composition of a chamber opera about Church of Latter-Day Saints splinter groups that practice polygamy in remote outposts of the southwestern United States. The disappointment extended beyond the critics and … [Read more...]

"Beautiful pianist!" Such was the backstage verbal shorthand among Philadelphia Orchestra musicians at the Kimmel Center after Maria João Pires rehearsed May 16 for her first U.S. concert since 1999.. Replacing Maurizio Pollini, she interrupted her designated free month to play Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2 both in Philadelphia and at Carnegie Hall in what were Charles Dutoit's final concerts as the orchestra's chief conductor. Pianophiles know her as one of the great artists of our time. To nearly everyone else in the United States, where … [Read more...]