By James Jorden The opening of a new production of La Traviata at the Met tonight offers an ideal opportunity to address a fact of modern operatic life, the booing, apparently reflexive, of the director and production team at the first night’s curtain call. Now, booing and other expressions of disapproval have a long history [...]
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By Rachel Straus Today I’m inaugurating a monthly series dedicated to listing, and briefly describing, upcoming New York dance events. Here are eight suggestions for the best, the newest, and/or the most intriguing dance performances happening across the city in January: JAN 8 2011 Baryshnikov Arts Center Wally Cardona Intervention #4 Each Intervention is a five-day [...]
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by Cathy Barbash Just back from almost three weeks in China. While I write my reports on recent activity, here is a guest post from Qi Yue, Visiting Scholar at Yale School of Music and Executive Director of the Eastern Strings Music Festival. – CB. In China, the music-education market is much larger and more [...]
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By Alan Gilbert Yesterday´s trip from New York to Stockholm turned out fine, I guess, since I eventually arrived, but it would have been easier to take if the problems had resulted from the bad weather that has closed so many of Europe´s airports, rather than from a simple screw-up by the airline. To make [...]
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By Rachel Straus Nostalgia is the main event in most Nutcrackers. But in the original 1892 “Nutcracker” by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, the subject—nostalgia for one’s lost childhood—did little for the pre-Freudian audience. The libretto came from the 1816 novella by E. T. A. Hoffman. In it a girl’s favorite Christmas toy (the Nutcracker) comes [...]
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By James Jorden What makes a dedicated opera queen (well, anyway this dedicated opera queen) sad? Well, it goes like this: the General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera hosts a panel discussion to introduce the company’s upcoming new production of La traviata, the first non-Franco Zeffirelli take on Verdi’s tragedy to be seen there in [...]
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by Sedgwick Clark Seiji Ozawa’s fight with esophageal cancer and subsequent attack of sciatica has been increasingly in the news as Carnegie Hall’s JapanNYC festival approached. Artistic director of the festival, Ozawa was scheduled to lead three taxing concerts at Carnegie this week. Earlier this year he canceled nearly all his concerts worldwide, including his [...]
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By James Jorden Of course it’s insanity in the current financial climate to suggest that the Met should have done a new production of La fanciulla del West this year, even though it’s a very special case: the centennial of the work’s world premiere, which was also the Met’s first world premiere. In fact, to [...]
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by Sedgwick Clark “It’s been two and a half months since you’ve blogged,” e-wailed Web editor Susan Elliott the other day. “Your numbers have tanked, and soon no one will remember you. Let someone else walk the dogs, OK?” “Gotta get those commas right,” I pled. Once upon a deadline dreary, while I proofread, [...]
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By Rachel Straus How many ballet clichés can one film hold? Answer: Enough to make you puke. And that is what Natalie Portman spends a fair amount of time doing in “Black Swan,” the pulp ballet movie directed by Darren Aronofsky, which opened December 3. Portman, who plays Nina Sayers, a corps member of a [...]
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