Her voice precedes her; this, at least, is no surprise. It is among opera’s oldest tricks, for an onstage character to “overhear” the future object of their desire in advance of both their own and the audience’s sight; falling in love on voice alone is, after all, the very premise of the genre. In “Salome,” […]
Category: Review
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Sin City Drifting
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” is a work of relentless cynicism, where three runaway convicts build a Sin City that peaks then crashes. The opera also charts the gradual souring of a philosophy through liberal ideals, to the libertarian pursuit of freedom at all cost, to an […]
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Optimistic Nihilism
On Sunday, Olga Neuwirth and Elfriede Jelinek’s new opera, “Monster’s Paradise,” premiered at the Staatsoper Hamburg, staged by the house’s artistic director Tobias Kratzer. The work is a dark satire that involves a King-President obsessed with shit and modeled on Donald Trump; he battles a monster named Gorgonzilla, as vampires based on Neuwirth and Jelinek […]
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The Days of Change
There is always something cathartic in Richard Strauss’s “Salome.” Perhaps it’s the portrayal of a woman’s wrath which is not entirely unjustified, given the seething remarks of her ill-fated love interest, in turn not so far off from how men talk to women on the site formerly known as Twitter these days. Perhaps it’s the ultimate comeuppance […]
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On the Shore of the Cosmos
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 […]