Hearing it now, the grandeur feels curiously hollow, all sheen and very little pulse. The tempos sprawl, the drama barely stirs, and the singers sound arranged rather than involved. It is still impressive in the way a marble lobby is impressive, but you would not want to live there.

Michael Landman-Karny

Michael M. Landman-Karny has been devouring Parterre Box since the original 'zine days, back when shade was still printed on actual paper. By day he crunches numbers in corporate finance, but his real passion is spilling ink about the arts for various online publications and dropping cultural hot takes on Medium.
His operatic origin story is pure Parterre: Mama Landman-Karny's water broke during Rostropovich's legendary 1966 concert, but Papa (a certifiable classical music obsessive) refused to budge from his seat. The carpets have since been replaced, thank God.
When not analyzing balance sheets, Michael haunts theaters, jazz clubs, concert halls, and opera houses from his unlikely base in Anaheim. (Yes, Mickey Mouse's neighborhood, though he wouldn't be caught dead at Disneyland.) His cultural pilgrimages have taken him to the usual suspects (New York, London, San Francisco, San Diego) plus the requisite European shrine cities: Milan, Rome, Berlin, Vienna, Paris, Munich, and Bregenz. He has yet to make it to Bayreuth, although he would rather attend the Bayreuth Baroque festival than murder his vertebrae on those legendarily uncomfortable Bayreuth Festspielhaus seats. His one burning regret? Never making it to the Mariinsky or Bolshoi before Putin turned Russia back into the evil empire.
Areas of worship: opera (obviously), theater, ballet, jazz vocals, classical music and anything else that requires sitting in uncomfortable seats and paying outrageous prices for transcendence.

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