On Saturday, the Birmingham Royal Ballet will take the stage, not to the languid string melodies of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky or Adolphe Adam, but to the distorted power chords of pioneering heavy metal band Black Sabbath. The new production, “Black Sabbath – The Ballet,” honors the hometown musicians whose eponymous debut album helped spark a global […]
Category: Essay
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The Wanderer’s Return
As night fell on September 2, 1978, Iannis Xenakis stood, walkie-talkie in hand, by his console on the back row of a temporary seating stand. As he looked across Mount Elias in the northeastern Peloponnese from his vantage point in the foothills, he could survey a peculiar kind of avant-garde circus with hundreds of performers, […]
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How to Measure Love
New music mourns with a strange and violent passion. Each announcement of the death of a major composer sparks a river of public grief that is always torrential at its mouth—floods of tributes, letters, anecdotes, love notes, lessons, all offered in the reification of the dead. In the days that follow, the artist’s work receives […]
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Curiosity Without Limit
One day, I asked György Ligeti a question that had been troubling me for a long time: Did his constant need to break artistic barriers, either instrumental or musical-linguistic, stem from the traumas he had endured in his youth, creating an existential need for transgression? His response was a resounding “yes.” The unbearable ordeals that […]
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Une curiosité sans limites
Je lui ai un jour posé la question qui me taraudait depuis longtemps : son constant besoin de dépasser les frontières artistiques, instrumentales ou musicolinguistiques avait-il comme origine les traumatismes qui ont bouleversé sa jeunesse, engendrant un besoin existentiel de transgression ? Sa réponse a été indubitablement positive. Les épreuves insoutenables qu’il a vécues pendant la Deuxième […]
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Wounded but Alive
KharkivMusicFest is both one of the newest and one of the largest classical music festivals in Ukraine. Founded in 2018, it opened with an ambitious program. Since then the festival has faced huge challenges—a pandemic, a war—yet has still managed to find ways of offering culture to people in Kharkiv. In 2022, I became artistic […]
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A Chained Man’s Bruise
“You get this idea of someone knowing that something is not right,” experimental vocalist Elaine Mitchener says of Peter Maxwell Davies’s “Eight Songs for a Mad King.” “It’s askew. You know the headache you have when you have a migraine—you can’t actually see something in front of the eye? That’s how I feel with this: […]
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First Canceled, then Celebrated
On May 2, 2023, Valery Gergiev turned 70. One week later, Russia celebrated Victory Day—a Soviet holdover holiday commemorating the country’s 1945 victory over National Socialism. Gergiev spent that day leading the Mariinsky Orchestra in the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, closing out the 22nd annual Moscow Easter Festival—a marathon of concerts (often two […]
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A Private Place of Joy
I love that moment when the lights in the concert hall dim. The audience fades away, and all I see is the Steinway in front of me. Above the keys, in the black glow of the fallboard, I see the reflection of my fingers, poised for the dance. Everything is white and black, symmetrical and […]
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Denazifying “Carmina Burana”
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 […]