“Round fingers for Mozart, flat fingers for Chopin,” my piano teacher used to say. To a 10-year-old aspiring Rubinstein, these instructions made sense—at least as they helped me produce the different “atmospheres” (as my teacher put it) of Mozart’s mischievous piano sonatas and Chopin’s moody nocturnes. Moreover, the lesson held: To this day, I can’t Read More
“Round fingers for Mozart, flat fingers for Chopin,” my piano teacher used to say. To a 10-year-old aspiring Rubinstein, these instructions made sense—at least as they helped me produce the different “atmospheres” (as my teacher put it) of Mozart’s mischievous piano sonatas and Chopin’s moody nocturnes. Moreover, the lesson held: To this day, I can’t Read More
The classical-music world loves nothing more than a great composer’s anniversary. This year, the honors go to Mozart (his 250th) and Shostakovich, who’d be turning 100 had he survived his tormenters in the former Soviet Union.
In the yearlong burble of Mozart performances, nothing is likely to outshine the strobe-lit pianism of Mitsuko Uchida Read More
The classical-music world loves nothing more than a great composer’s anniversary. This year, the honors go to Mozart (his 250th) and Shostakovich, who’d be turning 100 had he survived his tormenters in the former Soviet Union.
In the yearlong burble of Mozart performances, nothing is likely to outshine the strobe-lit pianism of Mitsuko Uchida Read More
The art of the concert pianist is different from that of other classical soloists. The voice is immediately expressive of the singer’s personality; the violin, which fiddlers sometime think of as a “third arm,” has ready-made powers of seduction; but pianists contend with an enormous, alien machine. The eminent American pianist Richard Goode, who’s currently Read More
For years, the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center seemed an idea whose time had gone. The event was launched in 1966 as a scheme to keep the new performing-arts center in business during the summer (it was originally called “Midsummer Serenades: A Mozart Festival”). Under the increasingly lackluster leadership of its music director, Gerard Read More
“Handel is closer to us than many composers who came along years later,” William Christie said as we were having coffee in the lobby of the Carlyle. He was in town with Les Arts Florissants, his celebrated, Paris-based troupe of musicians, who are dedicated to making music written more than 250 years ago sound as Read More
Like a bad nor’easter, the city’s spring music offerings arrive with a roar. At the Met, a revival of Don Carlo, Verdi’s most complex masterpiece, has a powerhouse cast led by the gorgeous young American soprano Sondra Radvanovsky. Voice buffs can’t wait for March 10, when Violeta Urmana, a Lithuanian mezzo-turned-soprano, the likes of whom Read More
Julie Taymor’s staging of The Magic Flute is the Metropolitan Opera’s finest theatrical achievement in years. During the past decade, the company’s new productions have lurched between industrial fussiness (Herbert Wernicke’s Die Frau ohne Schatten), chilly mannerism (Robert Wilson’s Lohengrin) and creaky bravado (most of the revamped Verdi operas). But in putting Mozart’s crowning masterpiece 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
