Conductor Maxime Pascal delights in the vast, the weird, and the borderline unachievable. At the Salzburg Festival this year, he offered a program featuring two of Pierre Boulez’s most forbidding works—”Sur Incises” and “…explosante-fixe…”—each lasting around 40 minutes and featuring ensemble writing of dazzling complexity. Just programming one is a feat; Pascal did both, with […]
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An Explosive Legacy
Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival—or HCMF for short—is in full swing, celebrating its 48th edition with performances, workshops, installations and more, all against the backdrop of mounting economic pressures in the UK’s arts sector. Over 48 hours of concerts, interviews and informal networking receptions, I tried to work out how the festival is negotiating a harsher […]
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The Nobility and Carelessness of Humans
Così fan tutte” is a peculiar opera. The last of the Mozart-Da Ponte trilogy, it was the least performed in the creators’ lifetimes, then largely disappeared for most of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. Successful performances after World War II at Glyndebourne brought new interest in the work, and its […]
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Fluid and Amorphous
A new autumn brings with it a new season from Vache Baroque, les nouveaux enfants terribles of Baroque opera. This year’s offering is André Campra’s 1699 opera-ballet “Le Carnaval de Venise,” which received its UK premiere 326 years overdue. Directed by James Hurley and conducted from the harpsichord by Vache’s cofounder Jonathan Darbourne, this production, […]
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A Life Told in Gestures
It is rare for there to be new developments in “Ring” cycle staging without dipping into the trashy, cynical, or ironic; in other words, without making the saga’s characters worse than they already are. The trend over the last ten years has been to embrace rather than ameliorate the weaknesses in Wagner’s text and, by […]
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Situations for Distracted Listening
Every time cultural organizers huddle to pick a festival theme, their brainstorming heat surely counts as a modest contribution to global warming. In today’s attention economy—where information is overabundant and rage-bait has surpassed click-bait like an evolved Pokémon—art institutions are forced to perform the same precarious dance, navigating survival and relevance under the increasingly standardized […]
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Strength in Absence
In late September 1940, a month after negotiations between the French and German governments dissolved the Third Republic and established the Vichy regime under Marshal Pétain, Walter Benjamin found himself a refugee with dim prospects for legal exit from France. The German-Jewish man of letters boarded a train from Marseilles toward the Spanish border with […]
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The Clear White Light
In a staging of John Tavener’s “The Protecting Veil” at Clapton’s Round Chapel at Spitalfields Music Festival on Sunday, director Anna Morrissey led musicians and dancers from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in an expressive set of stage pictures, loosely following the scheme of Tavener’s work. “The Protecting Veil” collects a set of […]
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The Dissolving of the Line
Under the artistic triumvirate of Marie-Therese Bruglacher, Laure M. Hiendl and Bastian Zimmermann, Musik Installationen Nürnberg—in its second edition following a 2022 debut—set out to present music differently: “not as a normal concert, but as an experience in space.” But what happens to music when it leaves the concert hall and instead latches onto a […]
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Clanging Emptiness
In Fellini’s 1983 film “And the Ship Sails On,” a luxury ocean liner departs to scatter the ashes of a deceased opera singer. Like the big ship in the film, an opera house inevitably reflects the sociopolitical situation around it. When decadent, they inevitably fail. Yet the occupants of an opera house can fall into […]