“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 […]
Category: Review
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Black Swan
Ours is an age of anti-heroes. In art and entertainment, knights in shining armor are out; we prefer tortured mobsters, spoiled scions, or people on the edge. Now, a sterling example of a romantic lead has been upstaged in his own opera once again. Lohengrin, the holy grail keeper who according to lore descends on […]
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I Saw Morton Feldman’s “For Philip Guston” Twice in One Month
I had just finished making plans to attend the Rainy Days Festival in Luxembourg at the end of November. Within the festival’s theme of “Extremes,” I was especially looking forward to a performance of Morton Feldman’s epic “For Philip Guston” by Sophie Deshayes (flutes), Pascal Meyer (piano and celeste) and Galdric Subirana (percussion). Then I […]
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Event
I. Start—quiet, holding space, a busy sold-out texture: cough, two pints drunk in perfect sync in front, mumble, breath, program scratch, sniff, distant train rumble, zip, cough, “This is like being at a wedding,” lights down. White, hooded, quickly veers. Blue, holds… Crash, conflict, laugh behind, chirrup of percussion (wish I could do shorthand). Red, […]
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On Shame
Shame effaces itself; shame points and projects; shame turns itself skin side out; shame and pride, shame and dignity, shame and self-display, shame and exhibitionism are different linings of the same glove. Shame, it might finally be said, transformational shame, is performativity. —Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling 1. Two things about shame. First: it is […]
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Modal Incantations
Who was Yvonne Loriod? To most, she is known as a virtuoso pianist, an inspirational teacher at the Paris Conservatoire, and the dedicatee of many pieces by Olivier Messiaen, whom she married in 1961. Few are aware that she was also a composer, which is hardly surprising as none of her works were published in […]
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Mysteries of the Military-Industrial Complex
No opera captures the American death drive quite like “Grounded.” Chosen by the Metropolitan Opera to open its 2024–25 season, composer Jeanine Tesori and librettist George Brant’s paean to the F-16 follows Jess, an Air Force fighter pilot forbidden from flying due to her pregnancy and later assigned to conduct drone strikes remotely from a […]