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Sublime Fury at the Ojai Festival
Nostalgia isn’t an Ojai virtue, however, and younger composers kept things current. Messiaen’s nature-consciousness found a counterpart in…
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musical events
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Gustavo Dudamel and James Conlon Exit L.A.
When Dudamel was announced as Salonen’s successor at the L.A. Phil, in 2007, he was only twenty-six, and aglow with a celebrity that is…
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Chaya Czernowin Gives Voice to a Wounded World
Global disaster shadowed this year’s Witten Days for New Chamber Music, an ostensibly insular contemporary-music festival that takes place…
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A “Baritenor” Soars in “Tristan und Isolde”
In Act I, the stage picture is cluttered, the meaning unclear. This is an all too familiar issue at the modern Met, which, under the aegis…
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Vocal Resistance at the New York Festival of Song
We began in the world that was—in the humid atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Vienna, from which Zemlinsky, Schreker, and Schoenberg emerged. In…
World
Morton Feldman’s Music of Stillness
“I really don’t feel that it’s all necessary anymore,” Morton Feldman told an interviewer in 1972. “And so what I try to bring into my…
World
The Organists Improvising Soundtracks to Silent Films
A hundred and three years on, F. W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror” still haunts the moviegoing unconscious. Newcomers feel…
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“An Enemy of the People” Becomes a Spanish Opera
Perhaps Rigola should have been more willful in his handling of the text, since his libretto unfolds more like a selection of highlights…
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At Ninety, Arvo Pärt and Terry Riley Still Sound Vital
In the spring of 1976, a Latvian architecture student named Hardijs Lediņš organized a music festival at the Riga Polytechnic Institute.…
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A Season of Rage at the Philharmonic and the Met
John Corigliano’s First Symphony, which Gustavo Dudamel and the New York Philharmonic presented early in the new season, begins with a…
World
Bohuslav Martinů Is One of Music’s Great Chameleons
How does a singular musical personality emerge from an agglomeration of pitches? The characteristic quirks of major composers are easily…
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There Is More to French Opera Than “Carmen” and “Faust”
Virginia Woolf, in her essay “The Lives of the Obscure,” savors the potential fascination of reading authors whom posterity has cast…
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Bach’s Colossus
Bach’s Mass in B Minor begins with a majestic howl of pain—four adagio bars that combine formal grandeur with writhing interior lines, as…
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The Dissonant Howl of “Salome”
The Biblical figure of Salome, Princess of Judea, who dances before Herod Antipas and demands the head of John the Baptist as a reward,…
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An 1887 Opera by a Black Composer Finally Surfaces
In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, in 2020, and the cultural upheavals that ensued, classical-music organizations began including…
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L.A.’s New-Music Bastion
The first edition of Monday Evening Concerts, the world’s longest-running new-music series, took place on April 23, 1939, in a house on…
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The Berlin Philharmonic Doesn’t Need a Star Conductor
When, in 2009, the Berlin Philharmonic launched the Digital Concert Hall, a streaming-video platform for its concerts, the orchestra had…
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The Meditative Organ Soundscapes of Kali Malone
“All Life Long,” the title of the most recent album by the composer and organist Kali Malone, is taken from a poem by the British…