A story published today by legendary French investigative magazine Le Canard enchaîné raises allegations of sexual harassment against conductor François-Xavier Roth. Roth, 52, is a renowned musician and performer, and received France’s highest honor, the Chevalier degree of the Order of the Légion d’honneur, in 2017. In 2003, he founded the period instrument orchestra Les […]
Author Archives: Jeffrey Arlo Brown
… has been an editor at VAN since 2015. He’s the author of The Life and Music of Gérard Grisey: Delirium and Form (Boydell & Brewer), and his journalism has appeared in The Baffler, the New York Times, and elsewhere.
Posted inInterview
Fluid Like Water
Calixto Bieito is responsible for some of the most indelible images in recent memory on the European opera stage. I’ll never forget his version of “Die Entführung aus dem Serail” at the Komische Oper Berlin. Mozart’s music and the contemporary brothel setting rubbed off unsettlingly on one another—the composition acquired a layer of mysterious grime, […]
Posted inInterview
Create an Aura
In the composer Utku Asuroglu’s pieces, colors joust like a child battling with their plastic toys: passages of extreme, artificial, neon intensity sit alongside moments of sensitive beauty, moving from Starburst-candy orange to oceanic blues and grays. Lo-fi electronic glissandi and kazoos unravel into bare tendrils of melody. Many of his works traverse great textural […]
Posted inInterview
In Defense
Any day now, Stas Nevmerzhytskyi, the editor-in-chief of The Claquers, an independent Ukrainian online classical music magazine, will join the Armed Forces of Ukraine. A musicologist specializing in early music by training—“I graduated from the National Music Academy in Kyiv, which, unfortunately, still bears the name of Tchaikovsky,” he said—Nevmerzhytskyi founded the publication, with articles […]
Posted inProfile
Urgent Attention
Hear that? It’s the sound of a composer’s music changing. Timothy McCormack’s “you actually are evaporating” for violin and cello begins with a rapid flicker of timbres. Microtonal double stops, coarse strokes deep in the strings, laconic glissandi, the occasional single note, flit past. Ear and brain reach for the pattern. This is beautiful music […]
Posted inBreaking
New Lawsuit Raises Allegations of Sexual Abuse at San Francisco Conservatory of Music
When violinist Lara Michaels auditioned for a place at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), most of the faculty members remained quiet, taking notes on her playing from behind a table. Axel Strauss, a professor of violin and chamber music, was the exception. “He stood up, he came around the table towards me,” Michaels […]
Posted inPlaylist
A Luigi Nono Playlist
Luigi Nono would have turned 100 on January 29. He was born, raised, and died in Venice, whose tradition of separate choirs performing from different places within the church had a profound impact on the composer’s sense of sound, space, and silence. Despite this relationship with the past, few musical oeuvres have quite as palpable […]
Posted inReview
Two Flutists Got Drunk and Listened to André 3000’s Flute Album
In late November, André 3000 released “New Blue Sun,” a CD immediately dubbed his “flute album”—though clearly as much for the picture on the cover as for the sound of the instrument 3000 plays. Nonetheless, as a lapsed, bad flutist, I decided to listen to the music with a current, extremely good flutist: Eric Lamb, […]
Posted inInterview
Mission Family
In 2013, Groupmuse launched as an app to help you put on live classical concerts in your home. It was the height of the app boom, and outlets from Wired to the Wall Street Journal praised Groupmuse as the AirBnB or the Uber “of classical music.” Those comparisons read differently now—but Groupmuse was never trying […]
Posted inOpinion
Erotic Vocabularies
In his 1997 biography of Franz Schubert, late Austrian musicologist Ernst Hilmar points a microscope at the minutiae of the composer’s travels. If you have ever found yourself desperate to know the route Schubert took on his first journey from Vienna to visit a noble family in Želiezovce in the spring of 1818, Hilmar has […]