Dan Johnson
Dan Johnson was born in the desert and learned to play the fiddle. Now he lives in Brooklyn, working as a freelance writer and music communications specialist and helping to throw some of the city's most notorious underground parties.
Here’s the bottom line: at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall stage on December 3, Iestyn Davies and viol consort Fretwork made the sweetest sounds I’ve heard from human beings all year.
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War! Heroism! Mysterious strangers! Attempted suicide! Steadfast love! Così fan tutte, as staged November 18-21 at Juilliard Opera, had… none of these things.
The music was at every point dramatically compelling, without seeming cheap or manipulative.
The aesthetic vision of M. Lamar’s Funeral Doom Spiritual was undeniable.
anatomy theater, receiving its New York premiere Saturday night at this year’s Prototype Festival, is a conceptual exercise in which nothing, absolutely nothing is left to the imagination.
Breaking the Waves is not only a “real opera,” it is an immensely powerful work of music drama.
Is there anything more essentially operatic than the suffering of women?
I was led through a small labyrinth of white curtains, sheer like veils, to a row of seven chairs jutting in between the stage risers.
Wednesday afternoon, Pocket Orchestra New York’s new PONYmobile presented a guerrilla performance of sorts in a most unlikely space, the XES Lounge in Manhattan, where designer Joel Yapching‘s BOOK homme debuted its Spring/Summer 2012 collection to the strains of Monteverdi’s Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in patria.
Since it’s put on in lavish productions at the biggest houses, sung by the biggest stars, since it wrings such a rich sound out of such a small band, and since the musical, formal and literary ambitions of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s great meta-opera are so very grand, it might be easy to…
I had every reason to think I’d love the New York Phil’s production of The Cunning Little Vixen as much as I did their staging of Le Grand Macabre with the same creative team.
John Corigliano‘s first and second symphonies won the Grawemeyer and the Pulitzer, respectively; the premiere of his Third Symphony wasn’t even reviewed by the Times. His score for The Red Violin won an Oscar™; his score for Edge of Darkness ended up on the cutting room floor. Is there an American composer at once more…
“I just saw a woman upstairs,” said poet/translator Richard Howard, “wearing a very large pair of sunglasses that made her look for all the world like a great dragonfly.” “Upstairs” was the balcony at the Met; at the time, I was taking Howard’s lecture on the subject of frivolity in literature, and so when I…
I’d never actually seen a production of Lohengrin before I agreed to review a new Decca DVD of Richard Jones‘s staging for the Bayerische Staastoper, starring Jonas Kaufmann, so I hope I’ve got this right: It’s about this architect named Elsa, who lives in an Orwellian steampunk Germany that has videocamera technology but still dresses like…
Look, this is a very special piece of music for me. You were twenty once, right? You were self-righteous. You had your musical heroes, and your mind was being remolded every fifteen minutes or so by a rapid succession of new experiences that challenged your notions of what music could do.
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