Date 12/22/2016 Classical music social media gave us many funny, cringeworthy, or just plain strange gifts over the course of 2016. Here, we’ve collected some of our favorite Bagatelles of the year from our monthly series. Enjoy, and remember: if you look under the #classicalmusic hashtag, you never know just what might be waiting for […]
Monthly Archives: December 2016
Posted inPlaylist
A Pamela Z Playlist
The composer, performer, and media artist Pamela Z works with a wide variety of techniques, including “voice, live electronic processing, sampled sound, and video,” and has produced art both for the concert hall and the museum. From San Francisco, she sent us this playlist. Each track here contains a multiplicity of influences; taken together, the […]
Posted inInterview
The Middle of the Highway
On a recent Wednesday, I met the Norwegian violinist Vilde Frang in a café in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood: an area popular with classical musicians for its chic, international atmosphere. She had to cancel our previous appointment, writing on WhatsApp that she had a bad cold; then a doctor diagnosed her with mononucleosis. She described […]
Posted inEssay
Teaching at Sapir College
Ever since I started my new teaching job as a music lecturer at Sapir College in the south of Israel, I’d had the itch to drive at the end of the day and watch the sunset—a beautiful desert sunset, with its giant red orb glowing in a light that is particular to the Negev district. […]
Posted inEssay
Ringling and Riots
I was dumbfounded by the spectacular opulence of my surroundings. This was Cà d’Zan, the first venue of my “Overtures to Bach” series at the Ringling International Arts Festival in Sarasota, Florida, and once John and Mable Ringling’s beloved winter palace; a gilded mansion standing on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico, with stunning […]
Posted inEssay
The Savior’s Gaze
Upon hearing her own stepmother the Kostelnička guiltily admit that she was the one who killed her infant child—whose frozen corpse the people of the Moravian village have now discovered—Jenůfa, initially shocked and appalled, first orders her to “stand up.” Then, going against the general bloodthirsty tenor of the crowd surrounding them, she grants her […]
Posted inPlaylist
A Barrie Kosky Playlist
Often, music from childhood and youth doesn’t merely bring back memories of those times: it evokes real, physical sensations like adrenaline, sweat, and heartbreak. For this playlist, Barrie Kosky, the Artistic Director of the Komische Oper Berlin, mined his experiences as a gay kid growing up in Australia and the influence of his grandmother. His […]
Posted inRankings & Roundups
December 2016 Bagatelles
By VAN Team · Date 12/8/2016 Latrice Royal VAN in earnest mode: we love opera, and we love drag. Here, Latrice Royal of RuPaul’s Drag Race dances for an old white woman in a painting who, frankly, looks very glad to see her. If this is the start of a trend involving all-drag string quartets […]
Posted inReport
Temperature and Energy
The Fondamenta Sant’Eufemia, on the Venetian island of Giudecca, is a street that parallels the water. Its presence, rising out of the waves, feels almost arbitrary. Between storefronts numbered 610A and a chipping 655 is a lane where houses in red and gray give way to the same color scheme in smaller scales: the brick […]
Posted inInterview
Confinements
Round-number anniversaries of composers’ births and deaths can often feel arbitrary, excuses to keep programming the same music. Not Monteverdi’s 450th birth year. His operas are universal, important reminders that us humans have always had the same struggles, that we’ve been here before: 450 is a number that puts things in perspective. The conductor John […]