When Jane Moss, the Mostly Mozart Festival’s artistic director, throws her hands up and themes this year’s series as “Six Degrees of Separation,” you know this isn’t about Mozart anymore. Haydn, dead 200 years in 2009, and John Adams, whose opera A Flowering Tree is loosely inspired by The Magic Flute, are Mozart’s special friends Read More
The Park Avenue Armory, that massive Victorian hulk situated between 66th and 67th streets, is well known for hosting the Annual Winter Antiques Show, where a well-heeled crowd enjoys its elegant preview parties, Young Collectors’ nights, and other pleasant rituals. Earlier this month, however, its cavernous Drill Hall was transformed for an event that demanded Read More
Last week in this newspaper, Rex Reed wrote, “The music scene has been more interesting lately than the movies, and that’s a fact.” I’ll drink to that—and did, at Minetta Tavern, just after attending the first session (on May 10) of “VOX 2008: Showcasing American Composers,” held at N.Y.U.’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. Read More
Compared to the publicity blowout that preceded the season-opening production of Lucia di Lammermoor—a wild-eyed Natalie Dessay plastered over dozens of city buses—the Metropolitan Opera’s promotion of the company’s first production of Philip Glass’ 1980 opera, Satyagraha, which opened April 11, was almost restrained.
“Could an opera make us stand up for the truth?” Read More
Nobody who heard Karita Mattila sing the title role of Strauss’s Salome on the opening night of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2004 production will ever forget it. That she stripped (briefly) nude at the climax of the Dance of the Seven Veils surely helped fuel the fire, but mainly it was stuff of the performance itself, Read More
January may be a dead time for the movie business, but in New York, at least, classical music snaps back with a vengeance. Last week brought an exceptional head rush, as fond returns and new beginnings crowded the calendar.
At the center of it was Lorin Maazel, who, despite his advanced age—and the critical Read More
The opus ultimum of Berlin in Lights—Carnegie Hall’s genre-spanning 17-day festival of contemporary Berlin culture—took place in two performances on Nov. 17 and 18 at the United Palace Theater in Washington Heights, a lovably gaudy, gold-painted 1930 movie house in Moorish Revival style. New Yorkers watched nearly 200 of their well-rehearsed children, siblings and friends, Read More
The music of Tchaikovsky loomed large in New York’s orchestral life over the past several weeks, but it was not always well served. At Carnegie Hall, Franz Welser-Möst conducted the Cleveland Orchestra in a freeze-dried performance of the searing Sixth Symphony; farther uptown, Lorin Maazel and the brass section of the New York Philharmonic blasted Read More
Princeton, N.J., is well known for its university, but it’s acquiring a different reputation in the opera world—as the country’s classiest libretto shop. Back in the 90’s, the brilliant poet Paul Muldoon supplied dazzlingly intricate librettos for the lyrical, eclectic art brut of Daron Hagen. More recently, another Princeton great, Toni Morrison, teamed up with Read More
