The legacies of Wagner and Nietzsche, German geniuses long dead before the advent of the Nazi scourge, still buckle under the taint. Festival destinations like Bayreuth and Oberammergau (home of the Passion Play) that long eluded denazification have, albeit only recently, embraced an ethos of reform. While these people and places were rightly seen as […]
Category: Essay
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In For a Pound
09:31 11/2/2022 It’s a sunny, fall day in Lyon, and an email appears reminding me that I am young. To be young in the opera world is to enter a transient realm, between the strictly policed age brackets of young artist programs, and an audience demographic fetishized by arts marketers; where young can mean anything […]
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Out of the Woods
In the studios at Maida Vale, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and BBC Singers are warming up for a world premiere recording. It’s an opera that once graced the stages of Covent Garden in London, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and the Berlin State Opera. But the piece has gone without a professional performance for […]
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“I don’t know why I’m angry, I’m angry, I’m angry…”
“Almost one year since the escalation of the war in Ukraine, a generation of children has experienced 12 months of violence, fear, loss, and tragedy,” wrote the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on February 21. According to the organization’s most recent statistics, at least 438 children have been killed by acts of war, with 842 […]
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Quarter Rest with Fermata
Quarter Rest with Fermatafor Richard R. Schantz On this dayin the Weih-nocturne glowof this roomful of rhombicuboctahedronsthe real augmented by reflection time isn’t ordinary. Right on cue(you always said to anticipate entrances in light of narrative)there you areby your crystal fountain, posing unanswered questionsd’arte, d’amoreexposition, disclo(the)sure(your Sprechstimme unequivocalstill strictly, stubbornly non-rhotic). You extend, generouslyarsis, thesisup and down, […]
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Retrospection for a Ragtime King
Joplin’s was a curious story. His compositions became more and more intricate, until they were almost jazz Bach.— Music publisher Edward B. Marks, 1934 In 1991, when I was eight years old, I found a simplified version of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” and relished playing it for most of the year that I was in […]
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Wood Made Flesh
“If Marina Abramovic had been a violinist, she would’ve been drawn to” Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber’s “Rosary” or “Mystery” Sonatas for violin and continuo, violinist Daniel Pioro tells me. With organist James McVinnie, Pioro performs the complete “Rosary” Sonatas at London’s Southbank Centre on January 22. The cycle is spread across three performances in […]
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An Infusion of Essence
British-Chinese composer Alex Ho tells me over lunch at a bao restaurant in central London: “Not only for the enjoyment, but even professionally and creatively—you’re gonna make better work if you just get on with people.” Ho is one of two artistic directors of contemporary music collective Tangram (七巧板), a group of composers and performers […]
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Clothing the Future
Drummers, as a species, are generally granted asylum from the dictates of onstage formal dress. Their counterparts in classical percussion, however, are not so liberated: When Mike Truesdell, then a graduate student in percussion at the Juilliard School, arrived backstage to a fall 2011 solo performance in a t-shirt, he was promptly asked to change. […]
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Resonant Messages
I have been playing the piano since the age of three, but for most of my time at the instrument I was oblivious to the long history of African-descended classical musicians. Today, as a music historian and performer, I am drawn to narratives from and around the African continent and diaspora: to make sense of […]