Jacquelyn Stucker talks to Kevin Ng about repertoire, tearing down the Fach system, and what it takes to make music from baroque to George Benjamin her own.
Welcome, beloveds, to the Jessye Norman Memorial Museum. I’ll be the docent for your tour today.
As Phaedra’s tragic, all-consuming passion for her stepson Hippolytus has fascinated artists for centuries, Trove Thursday offers two of its lesser-known musical settings: Pizzetti’s opera Fedra with Régine Crespin and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson performing the cantata Phaedra, Britten’s final vocal work.
In a striking program at Carnegie Hall last night, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s), with guest vocalist Susan Graham, brought together a wide array of musical proclivities—good and good bad taste alike.
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.
The setting: a dark plaza extending directly in front of a storied opera house. The time: just after a ho-hum revival of something Puccini. The crowd streams out, moderately satisfied but also far from bowled over. A group open to a proposition, you could say.
“Playthings of the Gods: Essential Myths,” the Vertical Player Repertory’s evening of Monteverdi, Britten and Milhaud, heard October 8, was a satisfying treat. The soloists were excellent, although the venue, Christ Church Cobble Hill, had overwhelmingly boomy acoustics and robbed the audience of any nuance in the voices.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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