Writing about music, like the art itself, is alive and well in this country.
“This must be what the gods were like,” writes Craig Seligman about Così Fan Tutte in the latest issue of the excellently wise Threepenny Review – which, by happenstance, landed on my doorstep on the eve of Opera Pacific’s production of Mozart’s sublimely ridiculous, tragic operatic comedy. Only gods, indeed, could contrive the harmonies that [...]
In his sweat-drenched confessional called Bad Boy of Music, George Antheil allowed as how his discovery of the music of the future came to him in a dream. Acting upon his visions, he abandoned his comfortable Trenton, New Jersey, home, caught the next boat for Europe, and set about demolishing pianos to the delight of [...]
Photo by Joshua Paul The Death of Klinghoffer is again before us, insistent, moving, inescapable. Nobody of consequence has ever challenged the intense musical power of John Adams’ opera; within a different dramatic context, absent the outcries of Palestinian terrorists singing so passionately the basis of their hatreds, of their belief that “America is one [...]
In Glendale’s Alex Theater on a Saturday night in late September, the voice of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson soared upward on a jagged trajectory laid down by Johann Sebastian Bach. “Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut,” she sang, and the heart’s blood of an adoring capacity audience throbbed in concordance. Bach’s symbol-laden cantata texts demand a certain [...]
Alan's Poppies and Sage, photographed by Paul Cabanis, Spring 2010.