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.
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.
By Max Keller
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What does it mean to be a “gender transcendent diva?”
By Max Keller
The phrase “immersive Coffee Cantata experience” evokes being dipped into a giant, boiling vat of java.
By Max Keller
Taylor Mac isn’t known for being short-winded.
By Max Keller
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.
By Max Keller
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.
By Max Keller
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.
By Max Keller
Heartbeat Opera knows how to party.
By Max Keller
Let’s not forget that it’s only been two years since the Met mounted its first-ever opera by a Black composer.
By Max Keller
The opera took place on an actual boat: the Lightship Ambrose in the South Street Seaport.
By Max Keller
“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.
By Max Keller
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.”
By Max Keller
There’s nothing unusual about casting a woman in Solomon‘s titular role.
By Max Keller
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.
By Max Keller
Ghost sex is part of the popular zeitgeist.
By Max Keller
