You say you want a resolution

Instead of cobbling together one of those end-of-year highlights lists–I’ve never been big on them anyway, and besides, even if I was I’m too lazy right now to think about compiling such a beast–I thought I’d jot down for perpetuity (or until I click the “edit” link for the nth time) a few of my [...]

Bailing out the arts

In an op-ed piece in yesterday’s Washington Post, Michael Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, called for “an emergency grant for arts organizations in America, and…legislation that allows unusual access to endowments.” “The arts,” he wrote, “have historically received short shrift from our political leaders, who all too often [...]

James on my mind

Portland Opera is presenting Benjamin Britten’s Turn of the Screw in February, and so in preparation for my pre-performance talks, I’ll be refamiliarizing myself with a work I haven’t heard in a very long time and posting some of my observations on it over the next couple of weeks.
I’m also (re)reading the Henry James novella [...]

Rank amateurs

For the past week and a half or so, many in the online classical music community have been writing about New York Philharmonic trombonist David Finlayson’s blistering critique of Gilbert Kaplan, the wealthy businessman and Mahler aficianado who has made a two-decade long career out of conducting the composer’s massive Second Symphony, and who earlier [...]

Puccini’s 150th

Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini was born in the Tuscan town of Lucca 150 years ago today, and opera was forever changed as a result. (Some would say for the worse, but that’s a debate for another time.)
I discovered Tosca a little over 30 years ago, and although I was too young to [...]

Snegurochka

In honor of Arctic Blast 2008 in the Pacific Northwest, I’m highlighting the great Russian tenor Sergei Lemeshev (1902-1977), here singing the Tsar’s Cavatina from Act Two of Snegurochka (The Snow Maiden) by Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov. There’s no date attached to this excerpt, but I believe that it was taken from a 1946 Bolshoi recording of [...]

A non-operatic opera?

Greg Sandow always raises some very intriguing questions about the future of classical music. In his most recent blog post, he wonders whether the 2007 film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days might make an “almost mesmerizing” opera. (For those unfamiliar with the movie, it tells the incredibly powerful story of a young woman [...]

Joyce DiDonato on Handel

The American mezzo Joyce DiDonato is currently touring Europe with Les Talens Lyriques and their conductor, Christophe Rousset, to present works from Furore, her upcoming CD of Handel mad scenes. She recently wrote a very interesting piece for London’s Guardian newspaper in which she shared some of her insights into Handel’s genius. Here’s what she [...]

Rousseau on opera

In my last post, I mentioned that I wanted to share various quotes that would trace the broad historical outlines of what might be called an anti-opera bias, and I provided a famous excerpt from the 17th-century French critic Charles de Saint-Évremond. Today, I’m moving forward about 100 years to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who uses one [...]

An exotick and irrational entertainment

We all know someone who just doesn’t get opera. Try as we might to win them over, or at least to make a case for our interest, they simply can’t understand why anyone would pay good money to listen to people going on about such things as love, death, revenge, or cigarettes. And the fact [...]