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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.
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Among the many things that New York City Opera has proved it can do rather well, comedy ranks high on the list. The company has a real knack for finding fresh, talented performers with genuine stage presence — star-level singers and aspirants alike — capable of projecting good humor to the back rows of the…
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Loads of online chatter has erupted since Miles Davis was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this month. While the honor itself strikes me as a painfully dubious bid for credibility on the part of the Hall monitors, the discussion it kicked up has by-and-large been lively and valuable. This is especially…
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While my manic nocturnal ramblings of late may have suggested otherwise, I’ve actually been battling rather fiercely with some kind of nasty bronchial bug over the past week-and-a-half or so. It knocked me out of commission today, but the good news is that when I finally saw my doctor this afternoon, she suggested that I’ve…
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Back at the Iridium tonight for the final set of Anthony Braxton's Manhattan residency with his 12(+1)tet, Composition No. 358 filled the room with the sounds of surprise. During the course of an extended run by just about any band, you might anticipate a sense of routine to creep in by the end. Not so…
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Following two straight nights of seriously cerebral contemplation, I was due for a bit of a nostalgic wallow. That’s not to downplay the place of John Wetton in my personal pantheon: As singer and bassist for the progressive-rock band King Crimson from late 1972 to 1974, Wetton was in part responsible for some of my…
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A funny thing happens when a bassist plays one of Braxton’s basic eighth-note Ghost Trance Music (GTM) patterns at a fastish clip and lets the notes ring out, rather than clipping them off in a dry staccato: The result is effectively the kind of walking bass line that’s animated jazz performances since time immemorial. The…
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Anthony Braxton settled into the Iridium tonight for the first evening of a four-night run, and even after a day of general malfunction at the office, I made a point of catching this ever-challenging artist’s second set. I’ve followed Braxton’s career and collected his recordings, sometimes fairly obsessively, for just about two decades now (and…
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Cate Blanchett as Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, caught tonight at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and here enshrined in the spirit of ACD’s recent tribute to Gillian Anderson’s Lady Dedlock. Playlist: Peter Maxwell Davies – Naxos Quartets Nos. 5 and 6 – Maggini Quartet (Naxos) Harrison Birtwistle – The Axe Manual*; Oockooing Bird; Sad Song; Berceuse…
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Say what you will about the Second and Third, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth; for me, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 9 is the composer’s most willfully peculiar public statement. Never mind the superstitious weight of matching Beethoven’s magickal terminus; this was supposed to be a triumphal celebration. The Good Guys won. Instead, Shostakovich turns in a lithe,…
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One of my most highly anticipated musical offerings of the calendar year got underway this afternoon at Avery Fisher Hall, as Valery Gergiev led the Kirov Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre in the opening salvo of a complete Shostakovich symphony cycle. The series continues on Monday night with the same orchestra, resumes on April 9…
Night After Night 