In an episode of “Looney Toons” called “The Long-Haired Hare”—haughty classical fans were once called longhairs, supposedly after Liszt—Bugs Bunny quarrels with an opera singer. Bugs is hanging out in the Hollywood hills, singing and playing the banjo. Meanwhile, in his home nearby, the best-named Italian American in television history, Giuseppe Jones, is trying to […]
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Posted inBarTálk
A Proper Continuum
On Sunday, a new “Don Giovanni,” the final staging of Kirill Serebrennikov’s Mozart-Da Ponte trilogy, premiered at the Komische Oper in Berlin. It imagined the title character as being taken through the bardo throughout the opera, following the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and substituted movements from Mozart’s Requiem for the work’s usual finale. After […]
Posted inEssay
God’s Time
On a frozen evening in Silesia in January 1941, a young French composer, along with three other prisoners of war, performed an hour-long, eight-movement work for piano, cello, violin and clarinet to a rapt audience. “From the moment I read the back-of-an-album summary…the story of the premiere was inseparable from the music,” Michael Symmons Roberts […]
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The Thirty-Year Itch
“Madam, you have between your legs an instrument capable of giving pleasure to thousands, and all you can do is scratch it,” the English conductor Sir Thomas Beecham is said to have told a cellist during a rehearsal. The quip is still played for laughs, dredged up by the likes of Classic FM (“The best […]
Posted inEssay
Sitting Down, Standing Up
His very first composition journal is dated 1983, one year after completing his university studies in Vienna and so the first year he could properly consider himself a composer. Peter Ablinger was forever putting things in varying piles and compartments, time and space very much included. “Sometimes I think I might have been an archivist […]
Posted inReview
More Than Caviar and Nostalgia
Earlier this month, audiences at Osterfestspiele Salzburg (Salzburg Easter Festival) stepped into a world of shadows and smoke. Simon McBurney’s stark new production of Mussorgsky’s “Khovanshchina”—co-produced with the Metropolitan Opera and conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen—anchored the final installment of the festival’s three-year experiment without a resident orchestra. Onstage, religious and political factions battled for Russia’s […]
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Sweating, But Functionally
Last night, the Southbank Centre launched its new classical music festival: Multitudes, a space designed to bring different artforms closer together. Over the next few weeks, new video works by William Kentridge and Kirill Sebrennikov accompany Shostakovich symphonies, Igor Levit and Marina Abramović perform Satie’s “Vexations,” and Tom Morris directs a semi-staged performance of Mahler’s […]
Posted inInterview
Inner Necessity
In March, pianist András Schiff announced that he would withdraw from all his concerts in the United States for the 2025–2026 season, citing “recent and unprecedented political changes.” He has a good eye for the danger of such developments: His native Hungary, where he hasn’t set foot for over a decade, is an oft-cited roadmap […]
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This Body, Given (noli me tangere)
Let there be writing, not about the body, but the body itself. Not bodihood, but the actual body. Not signs, images, or ciphers of the body, but still the body. This was once a program for modernity, no doubt already it no longer is. —Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus She is known, absolutely—by her blue hair and […]
Posted inEssay
The Delirious Dance
After eight minutes of agitated, highly rhythmic vamping, the left hand and the right hand jockeying for space on the keyboard, the repetition of a D key so many times that most other pianists would have developed rapid-onset carpal tunnel syndrome, Keith Jarrett finally lets go. We hear an exhale. Now turning to stately, spaced-out […]