In the autumn of 2021, neatly coinciding with the release of her latest album “Amata dalle Tenebre,” Russian soprano Anna Netrebko published her first (cook)book, the German-language Der Geschmack meines Lebens (“The Taste of My Life”). Upon discovering this a few weeks ago, our only course of action was to throw multiple-course Anna Netrebko-themed dinner […]
Tag: Weird & Wonderful
Posted inProfile
Meet the Pianist Revolutionizing Classical Music
Offstage, wearing ironed jeans, polished dress shoes, and a dark blazer, Key Playerson looks more like a regular Joe than a new talent changing the world of classical music. Earlier this year, Playerson sent shockwaves through the industry when he famously swept the Queen Elsa International Piano Competition. He not only won every prize in […]
Posted inEssay
Mad Scene
Sylvia Korman is a graduate student in English at CUNY in Manhattan. They curate one of the most striking corners of opera Twitter, the account People Mad at Opera (@operacomments). “I’m not actually a music person at all,” Korman tells me. “I have no non-dilettantish background in opera.” But their knowledge of opera is keen. […]
Posted inReview
On the Stuplime
On September 25, under a ruined proscenium, on a parking deck, among ravers, punks, scenesters, and opera-lovers, as champagne for spent performers flowed nearby—grace arrived. Nine singers, four actors, a 15-member orchestra, and a conductor had been looping the same 150-second passage from “Le nozze di Figaro” without pause for 11 hours and 50 minutes, […]
Posted inOpinion
A Piano Down a Mine
Is classical music funny? The Witty Ditty Industry, made up of (mostly) white men in their 30s, would probably reply singing “Of course not!” Their retort would be snappily harmonized, with enough panache to make whoever questioned their authority look a bit silly; but not quite enough commitment to suggest this retort is entirely ironic. […]
Posted inInterview
Romantic Comedy
Kieran Hodgson is more of a comic actor than a stand-up. An excellent impressionist, his earnest, if ironically-titled, YouTube series “Bad TV Impressions” made him a viral lockdown hit. Yet he’s more interested in constructing narratives, on topics ranging from Lance Armstrong to the European Union, than improvisatory muscle-flexing. At London’s SoHo Theatre, he recently […]
Posted inInterview
Having a Miserable Time
In 2014, John Nolan, a graduate student in music composition at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, started a blog called Composers Doing Normal Shit. Still thriving in 2021, the site was one of the first to unite classical music with memeified internet humor. Now based primarily on Facebook and Twitter, CDNS is one of […]
Posted inEssay
I Tried 5 Composers’ (Ridiculous) Daily Routines
My email inbox likes to throw a curveball at me every now and then. Much as I hadn’t expected spring in the UK to announce its arrival with freezing temperatures and pistol whips of arctic hail, the suggestion from VAN’s dear editors that I undertake some of the stranger habits of composers was one I […]
Posted inReport
The Audiencers
We seldom pay attention to ushers. In “The Natural History of the Theatre,” Theodor Adorno’s otherwise extravagant sociology of concert-going, the usher receives only a glancing mention: a missed opportunity for a writer who discerned the ideological contradictions and atavistic energies of music in a thousand minor details, from gales of applause to foyerside finger […]
Posted inInterview
Physical Movement
In a 2015 Bloomberg article about Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic on tour, reporter Joel Stein introduced an “impeccably dressed, handsome, long-haired” man, referred to by members of the orchestra as “the international man of mystery” or “the most interesting man in the world.” He didn’t mean Dudamel. Stein was referring to Guido […]