The performing arts field tends to move slowly; Donald Trump does not. Last Friday, he announced that he would be taking over the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.; by Monday, he had dismissed a number of board members and installed a new interim executive director, Richard Grenell; and on Wednesday, he […]
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Posted inBreaking
A Freedom to Dream
Few classical music organizations in the United States are as vulnerable to the new “patriotic” diktats of President Donald Trump’s arts policy as White Snake Projects. Founded in 2018 by Cerise Lim Jacobs, a retired lawyer turned librettist, the Boston-based indie opera company’s mission is explicitly activist, with a longstanding emphasis on racial and cultural […]
Posted inInterview
Exploratory Shapes
The career of soprano Lucy Shelton has been shaped by exploration. Shelton, a contemporary music specialist who has premiered works by Knussen, Carter and Grisey, continues to prove that musical curiosity outweighs perceptions of age. Looking to the 2025-26 season, she’ll make her Metropolitan Opera company debut, in Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence,” aged 82. I sat down […]
Posted inBreaking
ENO Confirms This Season’s Designs Use “AI-Enhanced” Artwork
There’s something rather odd about ENO’s current season, and it’s not that it’s excessively short. As VAN has reported on previously, and others have recently noted online, there’s the strong whiff of unattributed AI involved in their work. First, it was in their website copy, which, for a time, claimed that Benjamin Britten was still […]
Posted inEssay
Heart of Glass
In “Maria,” a sad, nosy, seedy film in which Maria Callas dies once again, banalities appear dressed as aphorisms. “Happiness never produced a beautiful melody,” she tells Mandrax, her journalist-cum-hallucinogen. When her obliging footman Ferruccio asks what she has taken—the film obsesses about Callas’s pills—she floats back a response: “I took liberties all my life. […]
Posted inInterview
The Yin and Yang
On February 7 and 9, the Handel+Haydn Society in Boston will perform works by the former under their artistic director, conductor, cellist and keyboardist Jonathan Cohen, in a program featuring the soloist Joélle Harvey and titled “Love, Handel.” (“Love, Handle”?) Recently, I met Cohen—whose interpretations of the Baroque and Classical repertoire are unusual for their […]
Posted inEssay
Energy and Attention
They’re tapping you thrice on the shoulder, sneering and full of disdain. Look out: It’s the etiquette police! Etiquette can be the trivial stuff of lace doilies and debutante balls, but it is also laced with the potential to oppress. Shared etiquette can set us on equal footing with one another, while imposed and restrictive […]
Posted inInterview
The Constant Dance
On February 20, Marin Alsop makes her debut conducting the Berlin Philharmonic at the orchestra’s Biennale, leading a premiere by Outi Tarkiainen alongside pieces by Brett Dean, Aaron Copland and Heitor Villa-Lobos on themes of nature and climate change. Last spring, she made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera, but this next gig has the […]
Posted inInterview
Struggler
Alongside the regular recital appearances and branching out into conducting, in the six months between December just passed and May this year, the baritone Benjamin Appl will have released three albums: one, out in February, of Kurtág songs intermingled with Schubert lieder, featuring a rare appearance of the composer at the piano for Schubert’s “Der […]
Posted inPlaylist
A David Lynch Playlist
David Keith Lynch died on January 16, days before his 79th birthday. A polymath best remembered as the director and writer of “Blue Velvet” (1986), “Mulholland Drive” (2001), “Inland Empire” (2006), and (much of) “Twin Peaks” (1990-1991, 2017), few artists can lay claim to his idiosyncratic, inimitable comfort with discomfort in content and form.Lynch recorded […]