Steve Smith
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Since there’s nothing quite like diving right back into the deep end, I resumed my nocturnal activities tonight with the New York premiere of Salvatore Sciarrino’s Lohengrin, which was performed by actor-soprano Marianne Pousseur and the Alliance Chamber Players at Florence Gould Hall on Monday night. The concert was the third of four in violinist…
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Night After Night is taking a long weekend off and heading down to Richmond, Virginia this Friday, there to spend time with the good Dr. LP, ride some roller coasters at Busch Gardens, and on Sunday hit a major mile marker along life’s highway. (The photograph at left bears a clue — and no, it’s…
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The activities that opened my week have strangely echoed those of the weekend past, completely without premeditation. Last Saturday, I caught Robert Wilson’s Peer Gynt, followed on Sunday by a Handel work, Solomon, and a jazz set by the Billy Hart Quartet. Monday night was Wilson’s Lohengrin; tonight, I caught Handel’s Acis and Galatea at…
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Robert Wilson’s controversial 1998 production of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin returned to the Metropolitan Opera stage on Monday night, in the process recapturing some sense of how utterly strange this groundbreaking opera must have seemed at its 1850 premiere. Unlike that undernourished debut, helmed by Liszt in Weimar while Wagner was in political exile, tonight’s performance…
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Regarding my claim to the near-completeness of the René Jacobs Solomon about which I posted last night, correspondent Bob Lee, a well-versed and zealous Handelian, has written to gently inform me that more was omitted than just the one aria I mentioned. Lee counted perhaps four other excised numbers (the words of which did not…
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Easter Sunday brought a sumptuous feast in the form of Handel’s Solomon, performed at Alice Tully Hall this afternoon by conductor René Jacobs, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and an outstanding young British choir, English Voices. Composed in roughly five weeks during 1748, Solomon was Handel’s 14th biblical oratorio. The name of the…
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In its broad strokes, Robert Wilson’s production of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt — which was staged this week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Howard Gilman Opera House, and which I caught on Saturday night — was characteristic of everything I knew and had seen of Wilson’s previous work. Originally created for the National Theatre…
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Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, which enjoyed a well received run of performances at the Metropolitan Opera in the fall, returned to the boards on Wednesday night — a warm-up for this Saturday afternoon’s broadcast. Less than noteworthy, you might think. But the performance was more than routine for two reasons. First, the wonderful Finnish…
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An audible ripple of amusement coursed through Avery Fisher Hall tonight the first time a familiar trumpet motto from Rossini’s William Tell overture, a.k.a. the theme from The Lone Ranger, was quoted in Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 15. Most likely this suggested that many members of the audience — perhaps lured in by the better-known work…
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Mindful, no doubt, of Daniel Wakin’s April 7 New York Times article on late-seating policies at New York’s concert halls, bright yellow signs stood in the Avery Fisher Hall lobby this afternoon, warning patrons that there would be no late seating for today’s matinee, in which Valery Gergiev resumed his current Lincoln Center cycle of…
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No doubt like hundreds of other western listeners, I came to deeply admire the work of Indian singer Asha Bhosle long before I had any idea who she actually was — or even that the deliciously keening voice I’d so enjoyed in the Bollywood film scores I’d heard was so very often that of just…
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John Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1, which received its premiere in Chicago on March 15, 1990, is that rare masterwork any reasonable person might wish had never been written, given that its subject is the fury and inconsolable sadness brought on by the seemingly unstoppable loss of the AIDS crisis. According to various sources, the piece…
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While everyone knows that there’s nothing like the electricity of a good new opera on opening night, there’s also a lot to be said for returning later on in the engagement. Tonight’s performance of Mark Adamo’s Lysistrata — the closing night of its New York City Opera run — handily demonstrated this fairly obvious truism.…
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Again and again, the crowd went wild for the Met’s new production of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale tonight. It’s not hard to figure out why: Take a handful of star performers, put them to work in eye-catching costumes on an always-appropriate set, play the notes well and let Donizetti do the rest. Done and done. So…
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Look, I’m almost famous.
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For whatever reason, it was a rough day at work, and I needed a little something tonight to take the edge off. Happily, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra provided just what the doctor ordered, in the form of three savory rounds of various vintages at Carnegie Hall tonight. First round was Peter Maxwell Davies’s An Orkney…
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The romance of Robert and Clara Schumann — the furtive courtship, the blissful early years, the tragic ending — have always suggested the stuff of dramatic theater. Tonight, in a sense, it became just that, when the New Victory Theater hosted a performance of Twin Spirits, a semi-staged reading of passages from the Schumanns’ love…
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At least somewhat in keeping with last night’s encounter with VisionIntoArt, a collective populated by former and current Juilliard students, I spent Sunday immersed in music written by student composers. The main lure of this afternoon’s "NYU First Performance" event at New York University’s Eisner and Lubin Hall — a spare, elegant concert space in…
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Every now and then, I encounter a performance so dense with sensory information and so utterly unlike anything I’d previously experienced that, as a writer, I’m left struggling to conceive of a way in which I might describe what I’ve seen and heard in a way that does justice to its scope and impact. It…
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The remarkable Sarah Caldwell — opera director, conductor and visionary founder of the Opera Company of Boston — died of natural causes on Thursday, at the age of 82. Tony Tommasini’s fine New York Times obit is currently plastered on the splash page of the paper’s web site, a nice touch.
Night After Night 