I’ve known Georg Friedrich Haas for many years, first as a teacher and later as a friend and mentor, and his music has been a constant source of inspiration. Ahead of the North American premiere of his monumental “11,000 Strings” for 50 microtonally attuned pianos and chamber orchestra performed by Klangforum Wien at the Park […]
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Posted inEssay
Two Siegmunds, Two Wälses
After writing 9,000 words on the “Ring” cycle, I thought that maybe I’d finally be done thinking about it. For a while, I was. Then, after what would be a two-month break in my obsession, I decided to return to something I wanted to write about at the time but never got to. During the […]
Posted inOpinion
Selective Empathy
When it comes to the Middle East, people regress into totalitarian positions and tribal logics with sobering speed. Where do you stand? Are you “pro-Israel” or “pro-Palestine”? Do you say “genocide,” or don’t you? In some parts of the Free Palestine movement, activism against the Netanyahu government goes hand-in-hand with the glorification of Hamas as […]
Posted inEssay
Unwind, Unwound
Taken to orchestral concerts as a child, I was restless. The complexity and vast architectures of a typical Romantic symphony made me think of the music as some fractal maze, wholly illegible in its ever-shifting textures and bombastic pronouncements of brass-laden grandeur. It felt like sound and fury signifying nothing. Then came the slow movement. […]
Posted inBreaking
The Paternal Presence
The last time I saw Christoph von Dohnányi was at a lovely dinner at his apartment in Munich this last June. We were celebrating a positive health report his wife Barbara had just received and the mood was easy, relaxed, and convivial. The conversation with CvD covered enormous ground, as it always did—he spoke with […]
Posted inProfile
The Transcriber
Donde menos se piensa, salta la liebre—where you least expect it, the hare leaps. Sancho Panza’s proverb from the Second Part of Don Quijote conveys the suddenness with which insight can arrive. The hare leapt for me while reading Lydia Davis’s essay “Demanding Pleasures: On the Art of Observation” in Harper’s. Responding to the perennial […]
Posted inBarTálk
Fluid and Amorphous
A new autumn brings with it a new season from Vache Baroque, les nouveaux enfants terribles of Baroque opera. This year’s offering is André Campra’s 1699 opera-ballet “Le Carnaval de Venise,” which received its UK premiere 326 years overdue. Directed by James Hurley and conducted from the harpsichord by Vache’s cofounder Jonathan Darbourne, this production, […]
Posted inReport
Low Note
In a video on the social media page High Note, an account launched on July 29 featuring “street interviews with classical music icons,” the tenor Freddie De Tommaso stands outside a pub drinking a Guinness, joking with a female interviewer about whether his favorite composer is Verdi, Puccini, or Sean Paul. In about 40 seconds, […]
Posted inReport
The Other Wage Gap
It is a truth universally if quietly acknowledged that a singer in possession of work will be paid less than the orchestral instrumentalists with whom they perform. So goes the consensus among the working singers of America’s classical music industry, and for good reason: job postings for opera singers often list compensation rates which break […]
Posted inOpinion
Machine in the Gods
When Richard Wagner’s Festspielhaus opened in Bayreuth in 1876, it boasted the latest in theater technology. From its covered orchestra pit to its state-of-the-art lighting and stage machinery, the theater’s technical innovations were meant to mirror the composer’s experimentations with harmony, structure, and form. The Bayreuth Festival was inaugurated with the first complete performance of […]