In June 2013, the Aldeburgh Festival celebrated the centenary of its founder, Benjamin Britten, by brutalizing his music. “Grimes on the Beach,” a production of the opera “Peter Grimes” that was performed over three nights on the very shoreline that first gave George Crabbe, and then Britten, a setting for their stories of Suffolk fisherfolk […]
Category: Review
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Deep Listen: Clara Iannotta
I’m listening to “dead wasps in the jam-jar (ii),” a string work by Clara Iannotta, and I’m disoriented. Though I play violin in string orchestras, and have for years, I feel like a layperson without any visual information. How do the performers make those frog croaks—bowing overpressure, probably, but with or without the left hand? […]
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Deep Listen: Maryanne Amacher
Magic Eye images, or autostereograms, are those illusory images you used to see in books and magazines back in the ‘90s. If looked at in the right way or for the right amount of time, parts of the image would appear on a separate plane and acquire a kind of three-dimensionality produced entirely within the […]
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The Mischief I Made
When a friend sent me a YouTube video of Helmut Lachenmann’s newest piece, “Marche fatale” for orchestra, I texted him back asking, “Holy shit, is this a joke?” The eminent German, who writes noisy works of intimidating craft and intelligence, who has probably single-handedly invented more new instrumental sounds than anyone in music history, had […]
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I Tried To Exercise With “Classical Music For Exercising” Videos
Things didn’t go so well last time: studying to classical music left me a nervous wreck, lying in a figurative fetal position, and imagining the walls closing in around me. Nevertheless, there apparently remain yet more unintended purposes for orchestras, and we shall not stop until we’ve tested all of them. So what, then, of […]
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I Tried To Study With “Classical Music for Studying” Videos
While discussing what would or would not be permitted in their Kallipolis, the hypothetical philosopher’s state, Plato and Socrates decided that music should for the most part be banished altogether. Today, music can accompany you at every single moment of your life: YouTube is full of classical concerts and playlists for sleeping, running, waking up, […]
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The Architecture of Experience
Attendees of the Ultima Oslo festival took cover from the rainy September weather at venues that ranged from a railway underpass to a waste water purification plant to a mausoleum in the woods. These soundscapes often provided a physical refuge from the gloomy dampness, but simultaneously unsettled and destabilized aesthetic norms. Wading around town in […]
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Is An Opera An Opera An Opera?
Dazzlingly abstruse and brimming over with surreal touches, “The Mother of Us All,” an opera with music by Virgil Thomson and a libretto by Gertrude Stein, is an idiosyncratic choice for an experiment in community building in Hudson, New York. The work tells the story of Susan B. Anthony, or something like it. At one […]
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Two Sides of a Concert, Part I
Naively in retrospect, I came to the Deutsche Oper’s recent production of “Elektra” with an expectation that its reception would be mostly positive. The work is a staple of German opera, staged at a respected German opera house, seasonally appropriate with blood and gore in October, and featuring a world-renowned Wagnerian soprano, Catherine Foster, in […]
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Two Sides Of A Concert, Part III
I rang in the new year at the San Francisco Symphony, interviewing audience members about the evening’s entertainment: Seth MacFarlane. The creator of the popular TV series “Family Guy” and “The Orville,” among others, MacFarlane is also a baritone. On December 31, he sang jazz standards and Broadway numbers under the direction of Edwin Outwater. […]