Aïda Nosrat’s “Common Routes” sounds, at first, like a record about travel. It takes several listenings to fix its geometry: The accordion is French, the guitar idiom is Manouche, the groove absorbed from Burkina Faso. Nosrat’s voice moves through all of it with an ease that suggests she has been waiting for these specific interlocutors […]
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The Eternal Hunting Grounds
On April 24, Günter Pichler, a founding member and the first violinist of the Alban Berg Quartet, died at the age of 85. Here, Krzysztof Chorzelski, the violist of the Belcea Quartet, remembers the great musician who was his mentor. When I was a teenager living in Poland, I discovered the Alban Berg Quartet’s recording […]
Posted inReport
Filling the Map
In 2013, director and soprano Julia Mintzer sang in a revival of “Die Zauberflöte” at the Semperoper Dresden. The production was mounted, Mintzer said, “in three fucking days.” At the same house, she told me, “Ariadne auf Naxos” was on its feet in a week, and “La Traviata” in a luxurious two—but only because the leads were new […]
Posted inReview
Posing The Question of Palestine at Crisco Disco
A librettist-turned-priest, a dramatic soprano, and the creative director of Christian Dior walk into a bar called Crisco Disco. It’s a late April evening in Florence, and the room smells of high-end fragrances, mildew, and poppers. A bear in a SnapBack is spinning tech house. Dancers dance. The walls are covered with guides to the […]
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What’s Left to Do
In January, Scottish guitarist Sean Shibe realized he’d been overdoing it. In February, he had a health scare—a false alarm, but one that nonetheless prompted him to book time off and reevaluate his working habits. For almost a decade now, he has been the definition of an artist in a hurry, releasing nine albums since 2017 (counting “Vesper,” […]
Posted inEssay
Incoherence and Indignity in the Classic FM Hall of Fame
“The radio announcer for Classic FM informs his audience that Vaughan Williams’ ‘The Lark Ascending’ has landed, by popular vote, the number one spot in the station’s classical ‘Hall of Fame.’ The background is established: that Vaughan Williams is widely understood – sometimes loved, sometimes loathed for it – as the greatest representative, even as […]
Posted inEssay
Mozart as Snake Oil
It was the year 2009, and the Walt Disney Company was refunding DVDs because they did not make customers’ children geniuses. Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, Baby Einstein LLC’s educational videos were a juggernaut of American child-rearing. The company’s VHS tapes and DVDs like “Baby Bach” and “Baby Mozart” consisted of soothing videos […]
Posted inEssay
What Remains Behind
It started with a feeling, not in the ear, but in the gut. Music had always been an intensely corporeal experience for me. When I listened, and especially when I played, the sound only seemed to start in my ears before making my whole body vibrate in sympathy. It felt as though there were reverberant […]
Posted inEssay
A Matter of Perspective
Recently, the world of classical music was rocked by the spectacular discovery of new works by two major composers. In 2024, scholars discovered a Serenade in C, soon nicknamed “A Very Little Night Music,” by Mozart. The little composition, written when he was about 12 years old, was found in a library in Leipzig: https://youtu.be/SS-tEwn4H-k?si=gSrtZE6Dm-b6ZyFF […]
Posted inReport
Welcome 2 Shorworld
In 2024, we reported on the meteoric rise of a composer named Alexey Shor. His music, which resembled the kind of music theory homework that gets Bs and Cs (and that multiple musicians compared to material produced by AI) was suddenly everywhere: in Valetta, Yerevan, and Dubai, but also in London, New York and Amsterdam. […]