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 […]
Category: Review
Posted inReview
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 […]
Posted inReview
Rings Under the Eyes
My year of chasing new Ring cycles across Europe ended, appropriately enough, in flames. On May 4, at London’s Royal Opera House, the second performance of Barrie Kosky’s “Die Walküre” provided a shattering conclusion to a busy, bruising season that has seen a staggering number of new productions of Wagner’s tetralogy undertaken by Europe’s major […]
Posted inReview
A Brighter Cave
“We have to find the Mystical Man,” my father said, in a room of Renaissance paintings on the ground floor of the recently reopened Frick Collection. Which Mystical Man? “He used to be here. You’ll recognize him.” We ventured upstairs to the newly accessible second floor, by way of the old staircase, once perpetually roped […]
Posted inReview
Saints of Doubt
In an episode of “Looney Toons” called “The Long-Haired Hare”—haughty classical fans were once called longhairs, supposedly after Liszt—Bugs Bunny quarrels with an opera singer. Bugs is hanging out in the Hollywood hills, singing and playing the banjo. Meanwhile, in his home nearby, the best-named Italian American in television history, Giuseppe Jones, is trying to […]
Posted inBarTálk
A Proper Continuum
On Sunday, a new “Don Giovanni,” the final staging of Kirill Serebrennikov’s Mozart-Da Ponte trilogy, premiered at the Komische Oper in Berlin. It imagined the title character as being taken through the bardo throughout the opera, following the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and substituted movements from Mozart’s Requiem for the work’s usual finale. After […]
Posted inBarTálk
The Thirty-Year Itch
“Madam, you have between your legs an instrument capable of giving pleasure to thousands, and all you can do is scratch it,” the English conductor Sir Thomas Beecham is said to have told a cellist during a rehearsal. The quip is still played for laughs, dredged up by the likes of Classic FM (“The best […]
Posted inReview
More Than Caviar and Nostalgia
Earlier this month, audiences at Osterfestspiele Salzburg (Salzburg Easter Festival) stepped into a world of shadows and smoke. Simon McBurney’s stark new production of Mussorgsky’s “Khovanshchina”—co-produced with the Metropolitan Opera and conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen—anchored the final installment of the festival’s three-year experiment without a resident orchestra. Onstage, religious and political factions battled for Russia’s […]
Posted inBarTálk
Sweating, But Functionally
Last night, the Southbank Centre launched its new classical music festival: Multitudes, a space designed to bring different artforms closer together. Over the next few weeks, new video works by William Kentridge and Kirill Sebrennikov accompany Shostakovich symphonies, Igor Levit and Marina Abramović perform Satie’s “Vexations,” and Tom Morris directs a semi-staged performance of Mahler’s […]
Posted inBarTálk
The Constant Organism
On Sunday, a new opera by Beat Furrer, “Das grosse Feuer” (“The Great Fire”), premiered at the Zurich Opera House. Directed by Tatjana Gürbaca and based on a novel by the Argentine author Sara Gallardo, the work, also conducted by Furrer, tells the story of an Indigenous shaman named Eisejuaz, whose community and individual being […]