People often look to classical music for Valentine’s Day inspiration. Which is great, unless your inspiration is Carlo Gesualdo. While there are plenty of bad mixes (and one actually good classical music for sex playlist), looking directly into the private lives and letters of composers also offers a trove of possibilities for everyone from your […]
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Posted inStuff I’ve Been Hearing
A Year in Listening
What does a year in listening really sound like? According to my Tidal 2022 Rewind, the albums I listened to the most this year tell a different story than this column: Bo Burnham’s “Inside” (because I have the triple-crown of anxiety, depression, and ADHD), the original concept recording of “Chess” (because it beats out the […]
Posted inReport
“You’re Afraid to Ask Your Friends How They Are”
On November 26, the Youth Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine (YsOU) performed a concert titled “A Night for Ukraine” at the Konzerthaus in Berlin. Supported by the Goethe Institut and the YsOU’s German counterpart, the Federal Youth Orchestra of Germany, the event had patriotic trappings, with blue and yellow light projected on the back of the […]
Posted inReport
Tainted History
In the spring of 2001, Suzanne Farrin auditioned for the Juilliard School’s prestigious composition program. The night after her audition, she says that Christopher Rouse, a faculty member at the time, tried to kiss her. “I sort of twirled out of his arms and ran away,” Farrin said. Farrin wanted to join Rouse’s doctoral studio […]
Posted inInterview
The Threshold of Time
In the big pond full of big fish that is the New York contemporary classical music scene, the Argento New Music Project, led by composer and conductor Michel Galante, is an unusual and irreplaceable specimen. As artistic director of the ensemble, Galante combines two qualities that rarely go together: An ear for logical and creative […]
Posted inReview
Solving the “Turandot” Riddle
For nearly a century, conductors, directors and composers have been trying to finalize and fulfill the promise of “Turandot,” Puccini’s ultimate, unfinished opera. A who’s-who of 20th-century artists have tried and mostly failed. Until this past Friday night, December 2, in Amsterdam. At Dutch National Opera, director Barrie Kosky premiered a new production which makes […]
Posted inStuff I’ve Been Hearing
Winter Journeys
In the third episode of “Dekalog,” Krzysztof Kieślowski’s ten-part series of interconnected short films (each based on one of the Ten Commandments), cab driver Janusz’s Christmas Eve is interrupted by Ewa, his former extramarital lover. Janusz abandons his family dinner to assist Ewa with what he believes is tracking down her missing husband. What Ewa […]
Posted inInterview
Transience
The composer Rebecca Saunders was not where I imagined her to be. Plans for a meeting in person were moved online, owing to her retreat to the countryside to complete a deadline. So it was a surprise when Saunders appeared, not in some remote rural studio, but in her Berlin flat. “I think a lot […]
Posted inStuff I’ve Been Hearing
Leagues of Nations
Among the cameos in Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, Kira Thurman’s jam-packed history of Black performers in German-speaking Europe, is Claudio Brindis de Salas Garrido. Thurman describes the virtuoso violinist as “a mirror reflecting German conversations about Black masculine musicality in the Kaiserreich,” or the German Empire. […]
Posted inPlaylist
An Actually Erotic Classical Music for Sex Playlist
Early this fall, I asked friends to tell me which pieces of classical music they believed to be “the all-time sexiest.” I promised there were no wrong answers. I wasn’t being disingenuous—though I was thinking about how erotic classical music playlists on Spotify and elsewhere, if not “wrong” or “bad,” are full of famous pieces […]