Earlier this week, Nina Guo, a soprano, composer and improviser originally from Pasadena, California, performed a piece of hers called “The Rides Are Going Up Again” at the Berlin experimental music venue KM28. The delicate work combined gentle, rhythmic spoken poetry with gauzy recorded vocalizations—a sound, I thought and Guo later confirmed, inspired by Morton […]
Tag: Opera
Posted inInterview
The Found Voice
Doğa Eren Birlik has her left hand on her heart and her right hand on the piano. Onstage at the Süreyya Opera House in Istanbul, she sings her heart out. It’s a special day for the 22-year-old Turkish performer: After making the final round of the Suna Korad vocal competition, she’s performing the beautiful, difficult […]
Posted inReview
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 […]
Posted inReview
A Spectator to Yourself
The reality outside the virtual reality is this: a blindingly sunny pre-fall day on Glasgow’s South Side gives way to a dark, almost bare studio in Offline (formerly Glasgow Artists’ Moving Image Studios). The room is divided into two halves, each with a square, slightly soft, and pleasingly bumpy fabric covering, and a stool for […]
Posted inOpinion
The Case for a New Music Theater
I. “You Want to Stop Listening” 1996, Bregenz Festival. The semi-staged world premiere of my opera “Nacht” on texts by Friedrich Hölderlin. The journalist Reinhard Kager predicted that the work would have a great future. Looking back, I understand why. Thanks to the spare scenic means (different plot strands were illuminated using different kinds of […]
Posted inEssay
Rough, Tender, Yielding
In England, the summer country house opera season is winding up. Dinner jackets fly south to the dry cleaner; wicker picnic hampers bed down to hibernate until the spring. Although there are summer opera festivals all over the world, the country house phenomenon is almost unique to the British: few other countries give such primacy […]
Posted inOpinion
On and Off the Menu
No, I didn’t attend any of the 11 concerts—four orchestral and seven chamber music—given by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra during its residency in Shanghai at the end of June. Dubbed the orchestra’s “first residency” in China by the press and the China Shanghai International Arts Festival (CSIAF) which hosted the orchestra, around 135 musicians and […]
Posted inInterview
The Reverse Conductor
In 2022, I sang Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem” at the Royal Albert Hall. During the performance a spotlit figure caught my eye, moving his hands dynamically and expressively with the musical flow, but who was neither a conductor, nor a singer, nor an instrumentalist. That figure was Paul Whittaker: a Deaf musician who uses British […]
Posted inEssay
Opera At the End of the Earth
Can you name a monumental four-opera series that brings together an extended, related cast of characters involved in mysterious and spiritual quests? How about a Great American Novel? Now, how about an artist who created both? The answer is the great American composer Robert Ashley, who died in 2014 just shy of his 84th birthday, […]
Posted inEssay
It Could Be Me
The curtain opens on Mozart’s “La clemenza di Tito.” On stage is a raging Vitellia: wannabe empress, scorned daughter, forgotten royalty. “He could have at least chosen a rival worthy of me,” she spits, of reigning emperor Tito. “Instead, he prefers a barbarian and an exile to me, a queen!” Vitellia’s father was the emperor […]