Max Keller
(Saskia) Max(well) Keller writes about classical music and queerness. Their work has appeared in Out, Out Traveler, the Provincetown Independent, Provincetown Arts, and Early Music America. Currently New York City-based, they write the substack Poison Put to Sound.
The term “narrative prosthesis” refers to the tendency for works of literature to use disability as the conflict upon which the whole narrative hinges. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is a quintessential example of “narrative prosthesis.”
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In the “tormented writers’” room, two actors in goth makeup and bride-of-Frankenstein wigs are clacking on typewriters and throwing crumpled papers on the floor.
It’s not so much that I hated the Met Opera’s Grounded. I’m just not convinced that it should have been an opera.
Heartbeat Opera’s The Extinctionist — composed by Dan Schlosberg with a libretto by Amanda Quaid — is the first opera, as far as I know, to stage a pap smear.
The phrase “immersive Coffee Cantata experience” evokes being dipped into a giant, boiling vat of java.
Taylor Mac isn’t known for being short-winded.
Light streamed through the stained-glass windows of the Space at Irondale, once a church, during the Saturday matinée of Heather Christian’s Terce as part of the Prototype Festival.
The beginning of Mary Kouyoumdjian’s Adoration is marked by silence. The young Simon, played by Sammy Ivany, lies on his stomach, scribbling in a notebook.
A frigid air swept through the crypt of the Church of the Intercession on Friday, December 8, nearly blowing out the candles that cast a golden light on the bundled-up audience.
Let’s not forget that it’s only been two years since the Met mounted its first-ever opera by a Black composer.
The opera took place on an actual boat: the Lightship Ambrose in the South Street Seaport.
“A Concert for Sugihara”—presented at Carnegie Hall by New York City Opera and The American Society for Yad Vashem on Wednesday, April 19—marked 80 years since the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
It’s debated whether Lili Boulanger’s Faust et Hélène, clocking in at only about 30 minutes, can be considered a cantata, a one-act opera, or a “lyric episode.”
There’s nothing unusual about casting a woman in Solomon‘s titular role.
The program for Jasmine Rice LaBeija’s concert as part of Works & Process at the Guggenheim on Wednesday, March 8 read a bit like a curriculum vitae.
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Pick a little, talk a little
Following the successful launch of the new regular feature The Talk of the Town in January, the team at the box is inviting contributions for a new quarter of operatic potpourri.
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