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It was late. I was tired. And emotions ran high when I spotted, and linked to, the New York Times article on Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s cancellations. I’m guessing that’s why it wasn’t until later in the morning, when I read Susan Elliott’s report on that article at Musical America, that the Times piece finally struck…
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Whatever I might have said can bloody well wait. Go right now to Daniel J. Wakin’s article in today’s New York Times, in which he — or, to be accurate, conductor Craig Smith — finally uncorks the trepidation we’re all feeling with regard to Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s constant cancellations this year.
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Tonight brought a special treat, somewhat off my usually beaten path: a preview performance of Souvenir, Stephen Temperley’s two-character, two-act play about the legendarily off-key society warbler Florence Foster Jenkins. The show was generally well received, and Judy Kaye’s portrayal of Jenkins roundly lauded, in an initial run late last year, which I didn’t see.…
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I can’t imagine that I have very much in common with Sir Simon Rattle, but two things came to mind tonight. One is that, like Rattle, my musical training was as a percussionist, specifically a timpanist. Perhaps that explains why, like Sir Simon, I was a relative latecomer to opera. (What’s opera got to offer…
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At an Upper West Side quick-eats joint Monday night: Clerk No. 1: “Yo, who won the basketball game last night?” Clerk No. 2: “I’m a musical-theater student — you think I’d know? (pause) I was watching Show Boat last night, thank you…”
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Thumbing through the May 1968 edition of the American Record Guide, which I rescued from some recycling bin somewhere, yielded this particularly choice advertisement from the now-lamented Composers Recordings, Inc.: INCONSEQUENTIAL! – The New York Times Not a good enough composer! – High Fidelity Considerable limitations! – Music Journal That is what the critics wrote…
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Less than a year after he was appointed artistic administrator of the New York Philharmonic, Chad Smith accepted the job of vice president of artistic planning at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the orchestra he’d originally left to come to New York. Filling his position here is Matias Tarnopolsky, who comes to the New York Phil…
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Unlike my previous, lengthy posts (the earmark of a newbie blogger, or so I’m told), I’m going to try to keep this one relatively brief. That really shouldn’t be a problem, since New York City Opera’s current revival of Sir Richard Rodney Bennett’s 1965 thriller, The Mines of Sulphur, has been much commented upon elsewhere.…
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“Après nous, le déluge.” That was how I started my Time Out preview of Anne-Marie McDermott’s latest project, a three-concert cycle of most of Dmitri Shostakovich’s chamber music (apart from the string quartets) at Alice Tully Hall, which concluded this evening. The series was presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. And while…
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“Now, we were dying laughing at the donkey with tennis shoes on…” Originally, I’d intended to attend Ivan Moravec’s recital tonight at Isaac Stern Auditorium. But the workload beckoned, and thus I’m sitting at home watching the soon-to-be-released DVD of Good to See You Again, Alice Cooper, a film of Cooper’s 1973 Billion Dollar Babies…
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Frank J. Oteri has rightly reminded me that the MET Chamber Ensemble performance about which I waxed enthusiastic yesterday was not, in fact, the New York premiere of Wuorinen’s Dante Trilogy. That distinction is held by Jeffrey Milarsky and Ensemble 21, who presented the works at Miller Theatre on April 22, 2003. Let the record…
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I had a bad feeling as I sat in Zankel Hall late this afternoon, waiting for the concert by James Levine and his MET Chamber Ensemble to get started. Frankly, it was impossible not to notice the strikingly large number of empty seats. For a while, it seemed that the event might have been better…
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“The world turns on its dark side. It is winter.” I wish I could claim that I was reminded of the opening words of A Child of Our Time as I arrived in Boston via the Fung Wah bus by fits and starts on Saturday afternoon, thanks to an unseasonable, slushy snowstorm. But to be…
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At the urging of Frank J. Oteri — friend, accomplished composer and chief instigator of the altogether invaluable NewMusicBox (where he, Molly Sheridan and others chart the very lifeblood of contemporary American composed music) — I started the day with a spin of Rehearsing My Choir (Rough Trade) by the Fiery Furnaces, which Frank recommended…
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On Thursdays at the office, I typically spend my entire work day listening to CDs I haven’t heard before, by artists I may not know, in the process of assembling the colossal concert-listings section Time Out New York runs every week. (I’m talking about the big rock/jazz/world music/etc. section here; I deal with the classical…
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I’d love to talk about why I strongly disagreed with certain aspects of Jeremy Eichler’s fine review in Wednesday’s New York Times, of the mostly outstanding Peter Mennin concert the Juilliard School of Music presented at Alice Tully Hall on Monday night. (To my mind, Mennin was a much more original and affecting voice than…
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This was only a matter of time. Given that my day job allows me ridiculously generous access to the rich abundance of live music available in New York City, yet doesn’t generally provide an arena in which to talk about those performances after the fact, it was probably inevitable that — once I got over…
Night After Night 