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I was supposed to see Pelican and Mono Tuesday night, but I didn’t. I’ve been planning to catch the MET Chamber Ensemble celebration of Milton Babbitt’s 90th birthday on Wednesday night, but I probably won’t. And the rest of the week is most likely shot, too, including a second encounter with the tenor not yet…
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I looked again today at the exactly 1,399 words I devoted to the weekend’s IRCAM concerts at Miller Theatre, and was sorely disappointed by something I noticed. No, not my usual redundancy of adjectives — well, okay, maybe that, too. But mainly, I was alarmed to notice that I’d devoted very little space to praising…
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This past week, musical technicians from Paris’s Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique — better known simply as IRCAM — came to New York for a conference with composers, musicians and engineers at Columbia University. The sessions concluded with two concerts at Miller Theatre on Saturday and Sunday, both of which provided a nice overview…
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Differences of opinion among audience members with regard to any given musician’s performance on any given night are certainly far from uncommon, but I’ve been absolutely fascinated to follow the reactions to Renée Fleming’s opening-night rendition of the title role in Handel’s Rodelinda at the Metropolitan Opera. About that performance, here’s what I wrote in…
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There’s an awesome beauty in the music of Boston-born, California-based quintet Isis. It’s a beauty made to fight its way through adversity, and it’s all the more affecting for its contrast with the clangorous din that surrounds it. Moments of radiance emerge like shafts of rainbow light furtively pushing through pinholes in an overcast sky.…
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In my experience of this line of work, there are few things more difficult than writing about an evening of entirely new music. Sure, there’s plenty of research you can do in advance to prepare yourself for a first encounter. And it’s not like there’s no risk involved in weighing in on a standard repertoire…
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The Metropolitan Opera might well have taken on Handel’s Rodelinda in December 2004 as a star vehicle for Renée Fleming, one of a handful of singers who seems to enjoy that kind of pull here. But to its credit, it didn’t stint on the production, mounting an elaborate, imaginative staging by director Stephen Wadsworth that…
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A bit more than 50 years ago, the young, relatively unproven composer Carlisle Floyd drew upon his youth as the son of a minister in the American South to translate the apochryphal Bible tale of Susanna and the Elders into a 1950s rural setting. The opera, Floyd’s third, was tremendously well received; initially staged in…
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Months ago, I’d made plans to spend this past Tuesday night at the Metropolitan Opera, to hear Deborah Voigt opposite Marcello Giordani in Tosca. But in late March I attended a performance by the Arditti String Quartet at New York University, which included new pieces by the school’s graduate-student composers. (A report on that concert…
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Deep downtown in Manhattan, near a still-gaping wound crowned by a sad excess of open sky, is a magnificent glass enclosure attached to a complex whose name speaks not of Apollo, but of Mammon. This is the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center, and ironically, it actually echoes rather frequently with the sounds of…
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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…
Night After Night 