Monday, March 5, 2018
Wednesday, January 3, 2018
Alex Ross on “The Last Jedi” and the Wagnerian leitmotifs created by John Williams for the “Star Wars” universe.
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 05:45PMMonday, March 13, 2017
The critic’s profession may be destined to fade away, but others will have to take up this simple, irritating, somehow necessary job.
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 05:55PMThursday, June 2, 2016
The Metropolitan Opera last named a new music director in May of 1975. Gerald Ford had been President for less than a year; Saigon had fallen a few weeks earlier; Barack Obama was thirteen. …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 05:42PMThursday, April 14, 2016
No one who follows classical music can have been remotely surprised by the announcement that came in from the Metropolitan Opera earlier today: James Levine, who has been the dominant artist…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 07:57PMMonday, March 28, 2016
Last year, the British critic Philip Clark had a provocative response to the perennial question of how to save classical music from its so-called image problem—the perception that it is st…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 07:23AMMonday, November 9, 2015
Jonah Levy, a thirty-year-old trumpet player based in Los Angeles, has lately developed a curious weekend routine. On Saturday and Sunday mornings, he puts on a white shirt, a black tie, bla…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 08:24AMMonday, May 4, 2015
In the prologue to “Pagliacci,” Ruggiero Leoncavallo’s nimble shocker of 1892, the singer who is about to play the hunchbacked clown Tonio delivers a sly apologia for the mayhem to com…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMSaturday, April 4, 2015
Andrew Porter, who wrote the Musical Events column for The New Yorker from 1972 to 1992, was not one to throw around superlatives carelessly, but on the occasion of his death—he passed awa…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 02:53PMFriday, February 27, 2015
A few years ago, I heard a film composer tell of a director’s reaction to his labors: “O.K., now make it twenty per cent more Cuban.” Such is the humble lot of composers in Hollywood: …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 10:01AMWednesday, June 25, 2014
The Met should have been better prepared for the outcry over a perennial source of controversy in the opera world.
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:31PMMonday, June 16, 2014
The mission of the New York Philharmonic Biennial, whose inaugural edition overran several of the city’s concert halls in the last days of May and the first week of June, is a brave an…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMFriday, January 24, 2014
The master percussionist Steven Schick, who will present a two-night, one-man survey of his repertory this week at Miller Theatre, grew up on a farm near Clear Lake, Iowa. His earliest music…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMFriday, October 18, 2013
Lotte Lenya never forgot the moment when she felt the musical world shift. It was in the rarefied setting of the German Chamber Music Festival, in Baden-Baden in 1927. “Mahagonny Songs…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, September 30, 2013
An opera about the strange life and sad death of Anna Nicole Smith, the Playboy model turned reality-TV star, sounds like an expensive joke. Mark-Anthony Turnage’s “Anna Nicole,…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, July 22, 2013
In 1896, a thirty-six-year-old opera singer named Luranah Aldridge travelled to Germany to prepare for performances of Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelung,” at the Bayreuth Fest…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, April 1, 2013
This year, opera on the East Coast has taken a turn toward the lurid, the sordid, the subversive, and the cryptic—in short, toward theatrical values that are more commonly found on Eur…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, February 25, 2013
François Girard’s new staging of Wagner’s “Parsifal,” at the Metropolitan Opera, is nearly as inexplicable as the work itself. The Knights of the Grail, dressed …
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, November 26, 2012
The 2011-12 season at the Metropolitan Opera was among the least artistically successful in recent memory, with vast quantities of money and labor sucked into the black hole of Robert Lepage…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, March 26, 2012
Harry Truman, an amateur pianist who often brought miniature scores with him to classical performances in Washington, D.C., once wondered aloud why the capital lacked a decent venue for conc…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, March 5, 2012
Last fall, Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, raised eyebrows on both sides of the Atlantic when he talked to the Times about the production history of Nico MuhlyR…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AMMonday, January 16, 2012
"The Enchanted Island," a lavishly zany production now playing at the Met (it will be broadcast in the company’s “Live in HD” series on Jan. 21), revives the concept of the Baroque p…
SOURCE: The New Yorker Subscription at 12:00AM 
