To look at his schedule or to watch him huff, stomp and jab with his hands—without a baton, always—at the podium, Antonio Pappano would seem to be one of the hardest-working conductors in the classical music business. For much of the past two decades, he has led Italy’s finest symphony orchestra, the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale […]
Category: Interview
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Switch Sounds Upside Down
Ron Carter is one of the titanic bassists in the history of jazz. Raised in Detroit, he started playing the cello, then added the bass, training as a classical musician at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and then the Manhattan School of Music. While still studying, he started playing jazz in […]
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Human Tension
Peter Sellars is one of today’s most innovative theater and opera directors. From his daring early work, including a famous / infamous Mozart-Da Ponte trilogy, which included a “Don Giovanni” set in East Harlem and a “Nozze di Figaro” in Trump Tower, to his groundbreaking Salzburg production of Messiaen’s “Saint François d’Assise” and through to […]
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“Like ‘The Archers’ On Speed”
It’s been a decade since Jennifer Walshe described “The New Discipline” in a program text for Borealis Festival. This was not a school or a style, but a way of working that she saw shared across music she was witnessing, “where the physical, theatrical and visual aspects are as important as the sonic.” The text […]
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A Very Private Sense of Fear
It would be customary for a performer of James Ehnes’s stature—internationally touring and highly in-demand, with four records released in 2024, residencies in Australia and Seattle, and a recent credit on a “Star Wars” miniseries—to be precious with their time. And those who have heard, whether on record or live, his ability to imbue and […]
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Exploratory Shapes
The career of soprano Lucy Shelton has been shaped by exploration. Shelton, a contemporary music specialist who has premiered works by Knussen, Carter and Grisey, continues to prove that musical curiosity outweighs perceptions of age. Looking to the 2025-26 season, she’ll make her Metropolitan Opera company debut, in Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence,” aged 82. I sat […]
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The Yin and Yang
On February 7 and 9, the Handel+Haydn Society in Boston will perform works by the former under their artistic director, conductor, cellist and keyboardist Jonathan Cohen, in a program featuring the soloist Joélle Harvey and titled “Love, Handel.” (“Love, Handle”?) Recently, I met Cohen—whose interpretations of the Baroque and Classical repertoire are unusual for their […]
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The Constant Dance
On February 20, Marin Alsop makes her debut conducting the Berlin Philharmonic at the orchestra’s Biennale, leading a premiere by Outi Tarkiainen alongside pieces by Brett Dean, Aaron Copland and Heitor Villa-Lobos on themes of nature and climate change. Last spring, she made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera, but this next gig has the […]
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Struggler
Alongside the regular recital appearances and branching out into conducting, in the six months between December just passed and May this year, the baritone Benjamin Appl will have released three albums: one, out in February, of Kurtág songs intermingled with Schubert lieder, featuring a rare appearance of the composer at the piano for Schubert’s “Der […]
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Indeterminate Acts
In 1959, the Smithsonian Folkways label released an album called “Indeterminacy,” a piece that features John Cage speaking, and David Tudor playing mashed-up material from the former’s “Fontana Mix” and “Concert for Piano and Orchestra.” Since comedian Stewart Lee and pianists Tania Caroline Chen and Steve Beresford first decided to perform “Indeterminacy” around 15 years […]