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It was only a matter of time before the nasty cold going around these past few weeks paid me a visit, and as it happened, this was the week. All things considered, I’m pleasantly surprised at how little it actually curtailed my plans: only one day of work missed, that being Wednesday. As a result,…
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Due to the shoulder injury sustained in an onstage fall last week, James Levine has officially withdrawn from his Carnegie Hall concert on Monday, March 6, as well as his first tour with the orchestra. Marek Janowski will step in for the Carnegie program, which includes Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1 and Beethoven’s Symphony No.…
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Despite my silence after last weekend’s burst, I’ve not been idle these past few days; far from it, in fact. The sheer intensity of the week’s workload precluded posting for a bit. Really, can you imagine interviewing Mark Adamo, the Emerson Quartet’s Philip Setzer and Celtic Frost’s Thomas Gabriel Fischer and Martin Eric Ain within…
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As I stood tonight in Fat Cat, a seedy West Village jazz club that might be described as a Dazed and Confused den of slack with postmillennial Village Vanguard aspirations, I wondered if, 13 years ago, I might have been one of those 20-somethings who sprawled on couches and lounge chairs, feeling vaguely contemptuous toward…
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At the end of Darkling — a new opera-cum-multimedia music-theater work previewed in full for the first time by American Opera Projects on Sunday afternoon — baritone Marcus DeLoach climbs to the rafters of a small, black-box in full Victorian kit, there to sing Lee Hoiby’s richly chromatic setting of the Thomas Hardy poem, "The…
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I’d been planning for some time now to add a blogroll devoted to my favorite pop-music writers; honestly, the only thing that held me up was that pesky matter of categorization. Obviously, it wouldn’t really help anyone if I lumped popblogs in with the current list of (mostly) classical blogs — too hard to know…
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The hardy Brooklyn Philharmonic, long an invaluable part of the New York City music scene, ushered in a new era on Saturday night with its inaugural concert under the direction of its recently appointed music director, the fresh-faced Michael Christie. Something of an antithesis to the New York Philharmonic — where tonight, former BP music…
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The New York Philharmonic gave John Harbison’s Milosz Songs a second airing tonight, following Thursday night’s world premiere. That event was well supported by The New York Times — both with a nicely turned review by Tony Tommasini and a strong Anne Midgette think-piece on Dawn Upshaw, the longtime Harbison collaborator for whom these songs…
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Lincoln’s Center’s "The Passion of Osvaldo Golijov" festival — one of the altogether more admirable productions Lincoln Center has mounted in recent years — came to a rousing conclusion this evening with a second performance of the composer’s La Pasión según San Marcos. Premiered in 2000, the work is well traveled enough now that I…
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You might well expect to hear all manner of unsavory words employed to describe the performance of this or that singer in a Verdi opera, but when’s the last time you heard a profanity aimed at the composer himself? For me, it was tonight at the Metropolitan Opera, when during the second intermission a well…
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Composer-bandleader Darcy James Argue wrote up a detailed account of what appears to have been a fairly electrifying concert by Alarm Will Sound at Zankel Hall. Argue is insightful, evocative, entertaining and not uncritical when it seems to have been warranted. Don’t miss it. Maury D’annato, of My Favorite Intermissions fame, offers another welcome perspective,…
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Saxophonist Bill McHenry is an utter mystery to me, in the best possible sense. He’s a young jazz musician attempting to carve out a distinct identity for himself in a city that boasts innumerable fine players, and in a music that prizes individual identity, yet arguably has few stones left to overturn — or so…
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There are mad scenes, and then there are mad scenes. Joyce DiDonato’s third-act portrayal of Dejanira — wife of the titular hero in Handel’s Hercules, which opened tonight at the Brooklyn Academy of Music — is a performance that crawls up under your clothing and itches relentlessly. She starts out the act ghoulish, shrunken, griefstruck…
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Friend and colleague David Shengold e-mailed this morning to report that the Gotham Chamber Opera performance of Albert Herring was still scheduled to go on this afternoon — as of about 10am, anyway. Since I’ve just spent the last three hours shoveling snow, however, someone will have to tell me how it went. Sadly, I…
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From the moment he stepped out onto the tiny Joe’s Pub stage tonight, Wade Schuman wasted no time in asserting his credentials as a musician to be reckoned with. Pulling out a harmonica, Schuman played an unaccompanied solo of stunning imagination and skill. He made the tiny instrument sing and growl; he blew multiphonic lines…
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The artist whose performance I attended on Friday night studied with Luciano Berio at Mills College in the ’60s, and collaborated not long after with Steve Reich to create music for a San Francisco experimental mime troupe’s happening. Said artist attended the second performance of Berio’s opera Un re in ascolto, took in a Ring…
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Despite years of training as a percussionist, this has revealed that — like M. C—, Alex and Lisa — I, too, am an oboe. Which is what my mother really wanted, until my grandmother made her cave in. Playlist: Carl Maguire – Floriculture (Between the Lines) Eyes of Fire – Prisons (Century Media) Andy Middleton…
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Since moving from Houston to New York in 1993, I’d gone out to hear Cecil Taylor an even dozen times before tonight. Had I figured that out in advance, I might perhaps have arrived at the Blue Note with superstitiously lowered expectations. Were I ever to claim that I’d seen a dud Taylor performance, tonight’s…
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Arrived at last in the house that Zeffirelli built for her, Angela Gheorghiu did what she does: namely, she gave a performance of Violetta in tonight’s Traviata aware of and alive to every broad stroke and gentle nuance Verdi wrote into the character. Yes, Gheorghiu’s voice is small for the cavernous house, and was sometimes…
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A friendly note from baritone Tim Krol, who sang the role of Owen Hart in the highlights from Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking at Trinity Church last Tuesday night, led to a rather delightful discovery. Mindful of all the television cameras in place that night, I knew that the performance was being streamed on the…
Night After Night 