Rafael Kubelik was a great opera conductor
Opera conductors … my favorite subject!
Gustav Mahler
60 pieces since 2006 — at 1 company, most often at Metropolitan Opera.
60
pieces
1
company
21
years
By company
“Modern convention is the oddity”
Michael Spyres talks to Kevin Ng about his winding path as a baritenor, which composer he wants to conquer next, and how he makes Wagner work in his voice — and in his native Ozarks.
A favorite art song performance from Timothy Gray
Wolfgang Holzmair‘s performance was amazing in its personal and intimate approach.
By Timothy Gray
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Onegin, off again
The Ralph Fiennes production of Eugene Onegin at the Paris Opera is just…fine.
Uncovered gems
Despite some complications, the Deutsche Oper exhumes buried treasure in Franz Schreker’s Der Schatzgräber.
Extravaganza of ideas
Iván Fischer‘s Mahler 3 with the Budapest Festival Orchestra at Carnegie Hall is memorable but crude, sometimes exhilarating and often tedious.
What belongs to us
Kevin Ng sits down with PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novelist and critic Garth Greenwell to talk about sex, queerness, and the “promise of opera.”
Sing out, Louise
Christof Loy‘s Louise in Aix-en-Provence scratches at the urban– and operatic– unconscious
A matinée, a Pinto play
Perhaps a piece of Mahler’s? For Wagner Month, Chris’s Cache offers the unexpected collaboration Die drei Pintos, started by Wagner-predecessor Carl Maria von Weber and completed by one of Wagner’s followers, Gustav Mahler
Walking through the valley of death
Peter Sellars‘s triple bill of Viennese modernism featuring Erwartung and a concert performance of The Raft of the Medusa stare down death at the Salzburg Festival
He plays the violin
This Bard production, led by Leon Botstein, makes the strongest possible case musically, dramatically and visually for Smetana’s opera Dalibor.
You can go your own way
Eli Jacobson on a luscious evening of early Strauss with Guntram at Carnegie Hall
Not an asset to the abbey
Francesco Filidei’s new opera The Name of the Rose struggles to bridge the past and the present in Milan
Strawberry blonde forever
The Met Orchestra Chamber Ensemble’s Das Lied von der Erde skirts the sublime at Carnegie Hall
Beyond redemption
This performance of Mahler’s Symphony N°8 at the Bozar in Brussels will probably be my last ever Mahler concert.
Conductors for the ages
In Munich, performances by 97-year-old Herbert Blomstedt and 32-year-old Thomas Guggeis show the city’s orchestral ensembles at their best
But joys all want eternity
Maximalism was on the menu last weekend at the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Macabre fascination
Can György Ligeti‘s only opera be understood as the composer’s own grappling with trauma, death, and memory of a past life?
The age of Innocence
The score for Innocence was menacing yet comforting, and, essentially, violent and peaceful at the same time
Voce di donna o D’Angelo
Her star is indeed on the rise, but squarely on her terms.
Decadent genealogies
Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder and Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot are, in their different ways, the final decadent flowering of a musical tradition at its twilight.
Color me impressed
Bay Area audiences starved for vocal fare during its opera’s winter/spring hiatus recently experienced two exceptional concerts with distinguished singing at the Davies Symphony Hall.
Small but mighty
One of the first things James Conlon did when he took over the reins as Music Director of LA Opera was create the “Recovered Voices” project, producing operas that had been suppressed by the Nazis.
Don’t you forget about me
It seemed like such a great idea on paper.