By ANDREW POWELL Published: December 27, 2013 MUNICH — Martin Kušej’s new staging of La forza del destino for Bavarian State Opera opened Dec. 22 and is due for streaming tomorrow. Well cast, it alas trivializes the feud and the questions of honor and destiny that excited Verdi and his librettist Piave, despite being the […]
Read the rest of this article »By ANDREW POWELL Published: December 22, 2013 MUNICH — Somewhere between the patent introspection of his new Mompou CD* and the tags of his early Stateside career — “big bravura pianist,” “new Horowitz” — lies an accurate description of Arcadi Volodos. It may simply be this: German Romantic, as in Schumann and Brahms, with impressionist […]
Read the rest of this article »by Sedgwick Clark Our Musical America Awards party was on Tuesday (12/17). As always, I got behind on my weekly blogs while preparing for the party. As always, in receiving their awards, our honorees spoke eloquently in words that left us all in awe of their commitment to their art. Susan Elliott provided a full […]
Read the rest of this article »By Brian Taylor Goldstein, Esq. Dear Law and Disorder: I work with an artist whose current US visa expires in January 2014, but he has one engagement in the US on March 8, 2014. The promoters are saying that he won’t need to renew his visa and can just use ESTA, however, we were under […]
Read the rest of this article »By: Edna Landau To ask a question, please write Ask Edna. As the year is about to draw to a close and the holiday gift giving season is upon us, I have decided to shine a spotlight on an individual who for the past fourteen years has given an extraordinary gift to music lovers in southern […]
Read the rest of this article »By Rebecca Schmid Vocal music, in all its forms of expression and social relevance, was the subject of a Radiale Vokalnacht at the Radialsystem on Dec.7. It was an opportunity to catch the vocalist-instrumentalist-composer Shara Worden, otherwise known as My Brightest Diamond, who performed with drummer Earl Harvin and accompaniment from BerlinJazzVocals. After the a […]
Read the rest of this article »by Sedgwick Clark British composer Benjamin Britten was celebrating his 50th birthday on November 22, 1963, when news came of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Fifty years later, we in New York’s major concert halls were somehow able to salve our memories of that world-altering tragedy and at the same time honor the […]
Read the rest of this article »By Brian Taylor Goldstein, Esq. An orchestra wants to commission a composer we represent to create an arrangement of a piece they want to perform. We were hoping that our composer would retain ownership of the arrangement so that in the future if the orchestra, or anyone else, ever wanted to play his arrangement, he […]
Read the rest of this article »By Rebecca Schmid While Il Trovatore counts as one of Verdi’s most gripping scores, the libretto’s sprawling tale of love and vengeance is not without dramaturgical challenges. A staging by Philip Stötzl which opened at the Staatsoper Berlin on Nov.29 featured several first encounters with the opera. Anna Netrebko, who attended the premiere of the […]
Read the rest of this article »By: Edna Landau To ask a question, please write Ask Edna. A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of leading a Lunch and Learn seminar at the Juilliard School. This weekly series, curated by Courtney Blackwell Burton, the director of the school’s Office of Career Services, covers a variety of topics of importance to the […]
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