Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” is a work of relentless cynicism, where three runaway convicts build a Sin City that peaks then crashes. The opera also charts the gradual souring of a philosophy through liberal ideals, to the libertarian pursuit of freedom at all cost, to an […]
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Posted inRankings & Roundups
(Almost) Every Piece by Darius Milhaud, Ranked
“The complete Milhaud? Won’t you be holed up in a bunker for six months?” said a friend when I mentioned this project. If people know one thing about Darius Milhaud, it is that he was one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century. His catalogue includes 443 opus numbers, composed between 1910 and 1973. […]
Posted inBreaking
“All you had to do was go on Google”
Before conductor Frédéric Chaslin asked her if she would be interested in meeting Jeffrey Epstein, the former French philosophy student, who was 21 at the time, had only exchanged a handful of messages on Facebook with him. One day in 2013, Chaslin asked the student, who requested anonymity, if she would like to interpret for […]
Posted inBarTálk
Optimistic Nihilism
On Sunday, Olga Neuwirth and Elfriede Jelinek’s new opera, “Monster’s Paradise,” premiered at the Staatsoper Hamburg, staged by the house’s artistic director Tobias Kratzer. The work is a dark satire that involves a King-President obsessed with shit and modeled on Donald Trump; he battles a monster named Gorgonzilla, as vampires based on Neuwirth and Jelinek […]
Posted inEssay
A View from Emptiness
I. It opens mid-motion, as if caught unraveling. A noise, brisk and grained, emerges from the second violin, bow hairs pressed against string. Col legno: The cello draws the wooden back of the bow upward and then down—a rustle makes itself heard and is gone. Now the second violin traces light, oblique arcs, upward, then […]
Posted inBreaking
Emails Raise Questions About Conductor’s Relationship with Jeffrey Epstein
“I found a great girl for your next stay in Paris,” the conductor Frédéric Chaslin wrote to Jeffrey Epstein in September 2013. Chaslin told the financier, who first pleaded guilty of solicitation of prostitution and of solicitation of prostitution with a minor in 2008, that the girl was a 21-year-old philosophy student who spoke three […]
Posted inEssay
Bartók and Janáček At the End of Liberal Society
When the Austro-Hungarian Empire was collapsing, but a new order remained uncertain, two extraordinary musical works grappled with questions now central to our understanding of the 20th-century political catastrophe. Bartók’s “The Wooden Prince” (1914–16) and Janáček’s “Taras Bulba” (1915–18) help us understand the cultural and ideological forces that prepared the ground for totalitarianism and the end of liberal society […]
Posted inReview
The Days of Change
There is always something cathartic in Richard Strauss’s “Salome.” Perhaps it’s the portrayal of a woman’s wrath which is not entirely unjustified, given the seething remarks of her ill-fated love interest, in turn not so far off from how men talk to women on the site formerly known as Twitter these days. Perhaps it’s the ultimate comeuppance […]
Posted inProfile
The Sensations of Disconnection
It was a rainy afternoon in an autumnal London as conductor-composer Jack Sheen tuned the quietude of Gerard Grisey’s “Quatre Chants pour franchir le seuil.” The performers, the London Sinfonietta and soprano Nina Guo, were receptive as he worked with them to uncover hidden acoustic relationships, finding sounds that were at once full and soft, […]
Posted inReport
The Rough Joy
Western classical music is often thought of as placeless: a grammar of sound that belongs everywhere and nowhere, drifting free of soil, climate, history, on some variation of Henry Russell Cleveland’s axiom from 1835, that “Music begins where language ends.” There is, we tell ourselves, a Schumann for all seasons. Africa, by contrast, is so […]