Take a Trip to Greece
By Way of Tribeca
I felt I was onstage in the final act of the Met’s current production of Berlioz’s Les Troyens , where Aeneas sets off for Italy. Giant white sails billowed overhead; columns wrapped like masts with canvas and ropes rose before the horizon, which was a Read More
A few Sundays ago outside Avery Fisher Hall, a man who was hoping to get into a performance of Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust carried a sign reading “Seeking ‘Damnation’ tickets. Willing to sell soul for the right offer.” What brought a smile to my face was not only the man’s wit, but his eagerness Read More
Hector Berlioz’s Les Troyens is opera’s most awkward child. After two years of feverish labor to fuse the spirits of his two literary masters, Virgil and Shakespeare, into a gigantic music drama about the end of the Trojan War and Dido’s tragic love for Aeneas, Berlioz was obliged to truncate the work by half for Read More
Many artists have regarded music as the greatest visual medium because of its uncanny ability to make the listener see in ways that no painting or sculpture, tapestry or fresco, possibly can. Because it springs so directly from the imagination, without dependence on such external objects as a paintbrush or a welding torch, and because Read More
For those of us who had the good fortune to grow up with classical music around the house-a not so unusual state of affairs before the disastrous schism between popular and “art” music occurred-attending a concert or opera is always, in some sense, a return to childhood. Hearing Murray Perahia in Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words Read More
