Richard Wagner and Benjamin Britten each created his own brand of utopia. Britten and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, established in 1948 a festival at Aldeburgh, a rude fishing village on the Suffolk coast, which served as Britten’s self-enclosed workshop and his platform to the world. Wagner, of course, had his royally financed temple Read More
Eavesdropping on a rehearsal can tell you a lot about what gives a symphony orchestra its personality. The other afternoon, I sat in the second balcony of Avery Fisher Hall, in the front-row seat nearest the stage, and watched Sir Colin Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra in a run-through of Stravinsky’s The Firebird , Read More
“Culture has become a destination,” Kate Maguire, the executive director of the Berkshire Theater Festival, told The New York Times in a recent article about the proliferation of summer arts festivals in America. According to The Times , our hills, valleys, glens and waterfronts are alive with 3,000 such events, attracting an estimated 130 million Read More
“Context” is all the rage in our concert programming these days. Ever since education in Western music was largely abandoned in favor of new liberal arts subjects like Gender in the Kitchen and the Psychology of Self-Abuse, impresarios have been desperately trying to reconnect audiences to Mozart, Brahms, Stravinsky et al., by linking them to Read More
