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
In what is surely an unintended coincidence, the city’s two leading opera houses have made highlights of their spring seasons out of a pair of American works that go straight to the heart of our incurable puritanism: the New York City Opera’s revival of Jack Beeson’s Lizzie Borden , about a pious young woman-turned-ax-murderer, and 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
