Toward the end of the 2000 Salzburg Festival, Gérard Mortier, the Belgian impresario whom the New York City Opera has just named to take over the company’s fortunes in 2009, delivered a memorable operatic rant that Wagner would have applauded. For a decade, Mr. Mortier had run the festival less like the world’s most exalted Read More
Oral sex on television is apparently no problem in Austria-at least if the sex is accompanied by the music of Richard Strauss. It’s impossible to know what the greatest opera composer of the last century would have thought about the decision by the Canadian director Robert Carsen to set a scene of his new Salzburg Read More
It was a sight that would have given Genghis Khan second thoughts: a battalion of armed policemen behind barriers, amidst an array of outer-space equipment that looked like a preview of the Bush administration’s missile shield. But it wasn’t happening in Nevada; it was happening on the plaza of Lincoln Center. And the advancing hordes Read More
Danube is one of the best new restaurants I’ve been to in a long time. When I heard several years ago, at the time the buzz began, that David Bouley was going to open an Austrian restaurant in TriBeCa, my interest was piqued. Twenty years ago, when he cooked uptown at Vienna 79, I had Read More
Perhaps it’s the effects of an end to the most destructive century since the Black Plague, but the prevailing approach to opera at the world’s most prestigious music festival this summer has been punitive. When you find yourself at a Don Giovanni whose noxious atmosphere makes the underground parking garage where you left your car Read More
