June 13, 2016 • 7:31 am Comments Off on Fascinating Rhythms: New Music from Anna Clyne and Classics by Gershwin and Beethoven Make a Stimulating Mix at the Seattle Symphony
Anna Clyne
Not even half over, 2016 has been an unusually painful year, not least for the losses we’ve sustained in the arts. Yet the Seattle Symphony’s final program of the subscription season conveyed abundant reason for optimism, at least as far as the creative spirit goes.
Filed under: Beethoven, review, Seattle Symphony
June 11, 2016 • 12:01 am Comments Off on Courageous Women, Transcendent Visions
soprano Julia Bullock
My feature on this year’s Ojai at Berkeley Festival curated by Peter Sellars has now been posted:
This year’s Ojai at Berkeley festival focuses on the artistry and impact of powerful, visionary women—not only as creators and performers but as the subjects of the artworks themselves.
Filed under: Ojai Festival, Peter Sellars, Saariaho
June 9, 2016 • 10:54 am Comments Off on The Other Mahler
Working on a piece on Alma Mahler’s songs. Nice playlist here:
Filed under: Alma Mahler, women composers
June 7, 2016 • 10:25 am Comments Off on Anna Clyne
Getting ready for this week’s U.S. premiere of Anna Clyne’s The Midnight Hour by the Seattle Symphony, which I’ll be covering later in the week.
Filed under: new music, Seattle Symphony
June 2, 2016 • 6:17 am Comments Off on Yannick Nézet-Séguin to the Met
The Met announced today that Yannick Nézet-Séguin will replace James Levine as new Music Director.
Live stream on the news from the Met at 10:00 am EST.
Filed under: Metropolitan Opera, music news
May 31, 2016 • 7:58 am Comments Off on Pairing Masterpieces by Shostakovich and Stravinsky
Here’s my new story for the Seattle Times on this week’s upcoming Seattle Symphony program:
On Jan. 28, 1936, Dmitri Shostakovich woke up to read a sternly worded condemnation of his music in the official Soviet newspaper, Pravda.
Filed under: Seattle Symphony, Seattle Times, Shostakovich, Stravinsky
May 26, 2016 • 7:58 am Comments Off on Piatigorsky International Cello Festival
Narek Hakhnazaryan in recital; photo by Daniel Anderson
Here’s my report for Musical America on the recently concluded second edition of the Piatigorsky International Cello Festival held in Los Angeles (behind a paywall):
LOS ANGELES—“Of all the titles applied to me, I like ‘teacher’ best of all,” the cellist Gregor Piatigorsky once said. And of the many angles that might be used to describe the festival devoted to his instrument and named in his honor, the most salient is a passion for sharing knowledge — not just musical knowledge, but the wisdom gathered from a life devoted to performance. More than anything else, the Piatigorsky International Cello Festival, which took place in Los Angeles between May 13 and 22, became an ode to omnivorous curiosity as the lifeblood of genuine musicianship.
Filed under: cello, essay, Musical America, review
May 24, 2016 • 12:13 pm Comments Off on Happy 75th, Bob Dylan
Filed under: Bob Dylan
May 24, 2016 • 7:15 am 1
After recently covering a powerful Flying Dutchman production and the world premiere of The Shining, a new opera by Paul Moravec and Mark Campbell based on the Stephen King novel, I decided to look a little more into the intersection of opera and ghost stories.
Here’s my new piece for Rhapsody. It’s a fascinating but enormous topic. I focused on the early German Romantic lineage, without even broaching the enormous popularity of Walter Scott-inspired Gothic opera (Lucia, etc.). Debussy’s Poe fixation, early Strauss/Hofmannsthal, Expressionism and other Modernist strains, and later manifestations are other topics I didn’t have space for here.
Perched in the Colorado Rockies in the dead of winter, the Overlook Hotel is the setting for Stephen King’s 1977 breakthrough novel The Shining. It is during the off season at the vast resort that King’s fictional aspiring writer, Jack Torrance, takes up residence with his wife and son. He hopes to work on his latest opus in the peace and quiet, with minimal responsibilities as caretaker of the presumably emptied-out hotel to distract him.
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