Last month, St. Louisans faced a unique risk when comedian Jim Gaffigan and conductor James Gaffigan played two very different shows in the same city on the same night. Luckily, it seemed that ticketholders for each event got to the right theater without any confusion. “My show is with @jerryseinfeld,” Jim Gaffigan clarified on Instagram. […]
Category: Interview
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A Way to Remain Alive
In 2005, a Belgian NGO came to Ramallah with a truck full of musical instruments to donate to the city’s nonprofit music school, Al Kamandjati (“The Violinist”). One of the boys who helped to unload the violins, violas, cellos, double-basses, and guitars was 15-year-old Shehada Shalalda, who lived in the neighborhood. It was an innocuous […]
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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 […]
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Creative Heroes
Filmmaker Sheila Hayman’s new documentary, “Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn,” premiered last month in London, takes as its subject Hayman’s great-great-great-grandmother, the prolific composer Fanny Hensel. The film provides the rare experience of viewing a documentary devoted to one woman composer, its thorough research portraying Fanny as both a musical genius who composed masterpieces and a […]
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Where the Trees Are
Whether it’s Julius Eastman’s “Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan of Arc,” Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis,” or Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” listening to Davóne Tines sing is like watching rock climber Alexander Honnold free solo up El Capitan: You’re struck by the raw power and voltage of his stentorian […]
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Vasily Petrenko’s British Values
Somewhere in the depths of the internet lies a photo of Vasily Petrenko with a wad of £5 notes, posing next to a bin. It was part of the Liverpool Echo’s “Be A Binner, Not A Sinner” campaign to clean up Liverpool and improve its reputation, after the writer Bill Bryson infamously arrived in the […]
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A Spiritual Condition
200 years ago, Schubert completed his sleek and touching song cycle “Die schöne Müllerin.” When tenor and lieder expert Christoph Prégardien sings the work, his voice has a lean tone and a silvery shimmer; each verse seems to flow out of him, both freshly invented and fully formed. Prégardien’s voice embodies Schubert’s actual protagonist: a […]
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The Manifestation of Forces
I was captivated by Grawemeyer Award winner Lei Liang’s “A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams” when Gil Rose of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project performed it at Carnegie Hall. Again in Ojai, California, Lei Liang caught my attention with “Vis-a-Vis,” a lively dialogue between Wu Man on pipa and Steven Schick on a variety of […]
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Spit On Me
Steven Takasugi’s Piano Concerto will be premiered by Roger Admiral, Ingo Metzmacher, and the SWR Symphonieorchester in collaboration with the SWR Experimentalstudio on October 22. It will be the final work of the 2023 Donaueschingen Music Days, a festival for contemporary music in southwestern Germany. The following texts were extracted from an interview held at […]
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Out of Hand
John Holloway plays the Baroque violin with a sinewy sweetness, his lines as textured and alive as the bark of a tree or the hand of a nonagenarian. That his career started on the modern violin in a conventional orchestra—after conservatory, Holloway was briefly principal second in the Bournemouth Sinfonietta—now seems as improbable as late […]