Susan Hall
Bio:
Recent Articles:
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Melvin Van Peebles, Going the Distance Front Page
An Appreciation
By: - Sep 27th, 2021Melvin Van Peebles, the black entrepreneur, died on September 21. Over the years, brief encounters revealed many of his sparkling facets.
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Young Composers at the Ojai Festival Front Page
Free to Be an Individual in Sound
By: - Sep 23rd, 2021John Adams writes about his release from the shackles binding him as a Northeastern composer in the US. Coming to California as a young man, he was at last able to write the music he heard, whatever shape it took. He was free to be an individual. Each of the young composers featured prominently in Ojai 2021 has clearly benefited from Adams’ experience.
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Was It Me by Andrea Fulton Front Page
Theatre for the New City is Live Again
By: - Sep 22nd, 2021Theater for the New City, Executive Director Crystal Field presents Andrea Fulton's Was it Me? Directed by Kymbali Craig, the play gives us a poignant peak into everyday life. Fulton probes the anguish of a woman burdened by an unresolved memory of a traumatizing assault in her childhood. Fulton brings the question of self blame to the fore as the woman asks: “Was it something about me that made this happen?"
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The Ojai Music Festival Is Now Front Page
John Adams Mixes a Potent Broth
By: - Sep 22nd, 2021The annual Ojai Music Festival is arguably the most exciting music event in this country. It “monitors the everchanging mood and directions of our musical atmosphere.” A challenge to be sure. A challenge which is richly met and then some.
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Angela's Ashes: The Musical Front Page
Irish Repertory Theatre's Frank McCourt's Memoir
By: - Sep 19th, 2021Angela’s Ashes, a musical based on Frank McCourt’s fictionalized memoir of his early family life, is presented now in its musical version by Irish Repertory Theatre. It is a conventional musical. Yet the memoir’s conventionality did not diminish the story’s deep resonance not only with immigrants, but with all readers who have experienced difficult childhoods.
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The Story Box Presented by Here Front Page
Suzi Takahashi Dramatizes Truth and Reconciliation
By: - Sep 16th, 2021Written and performed by Suzi Takahashi and directed by Kristin Marting, The Story Box explores the importance of safeguarding our civil rights through the lens of Japanese American identity. Using kamishibai (a traditional Japanese storytelling method), coupled with Takahashi’s own family history and original music, this show takes audience members on a 230-year journey through our country’s problematic treatment of Asian immigrants.
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Sweet Land, Opera of the Year Front Page
The Industry Produces Grand Opera
By: - Aug 29th, 2021Sweet Land by a consortium of artists formed by the adventuresome Los Angeles company The Industry has won the award for best new opera in 2020 from the Music Critics Association of North America. Music by Du Yun and Raven Chacon. Libretto by Douglas Kearney and Aja Couchois Duncan . Directed by Cannupa Hanska Luger and Yuval Sharon.
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Faust by Berlioz in Salzburg Front Page
A Masterpiece Revealed
By: - Aug 27th, 2021La Damnation of Faust is a glorious dramatic legend. It bombed in Paris, much to composer Hector Berlioz’ dismay and confusion. Yet even members of the orchestra he conducted at the premiere asked the composer about notes he wrote. “That note does not exist,” complained a horn player. “It sounds like a sneeze.” “That’s just what I wanted,” replied Berlioz. No one contests the musicality of the "Romane" aria, "D'amour l'ardente flame," so beautiful that it was selected to conclude the memorial service for Maria Callas.
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Elektra in Salzburg Front Page
Supreme Strauss
By: - Aug 25th, 2021Elektra, the stage drama that underlies the opera Elektra, was written by Hugo von Hoffmansthal for a theatre venue run by Max Reinhardt in Berlin. Reinhardt would go on to found the Salzburg Festival in 1920. After a hundred years, this Festival is inarguably one of the world’s most satisfying. Their new production of Elektra is classic and thrilling.
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Ojai Festival 2021 Front Page
John Adams Music Director
By: - Aug 20th, 20212021 Music Director John Adams announces initial programming for its 75th Festival 2021 Festival composers include Samuel Carl Adams, Timo Andres, Dylan Mattingly, Gabriela Ortiz, Rhiannon Giddens, Carlos Simon, and Gabriella Smith
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Richard Strauss' Home Town 2021 Front Page
The Richard Strauss Insitute in Garmisch-Partenkirchen
By: - Aug 19th, 2021Garmisch Partinkirchen is less than two hours by train from Munich, where Richard Strauss was born. After the smashing success of his opera Salome, Strauss hired the Art Nouveau architect Emanuel von Seidl to build a villa on the property located at Zoeppritzstraße 42 in Garmisch.
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World Premiere by Composer Eve Beglarian Front Page
Twenty-four Double Basses in a Grove of Trees
By: - Aug 16th, 2021When was the last time you listened to music that was composed by a piece of birch wood? Eve Beglarian, in collaboration with superstar bassist Robert Black, one of the founding members of the renowned Bang-on-a-Can All-Stars, has composed a fascinating new work entitled "A Murmur in the Trees."
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A Tony Award for Woodie King Jr. Front Page
At Last
By: - Aug 16th, 2021Woodie King Jr. will receive a Tony Honoring for Excellence in the Theatre on September 26. These awards were established in 1990. It's about time! King and his New Federal Theatre have been producing excellent work for over fifty years.
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Parsifal at Bayreuth Front Page
Celebrating 139 Years of Wagner
By: - Aug 12th, 2021One hundred and thirty-nine years after Richard Wagner’s final opera Parsifal premiered at the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, it was performed in concert in this house that Wagner built for its performance. Apparently, Richard Wagner himself took the podium to conduct Act III of Parsifal at the Festival performance in 1883. He died later that year in Venice. There is no recording of the performance, but witnesses commented on the extremely slow tempos and the majesty of the reading.
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Irish Repertory Theatre Streams The Cordelia Dream Front Page
Marina Carr Play in Dublin
By: - Aug 06th, 2021The Irish Repertory Theatre has expanded our notion of performance in their streamed productions. A company with a small theatre (146 seats in the main house), now offers its consistently superior productions to the wide audience they deserve.
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Salome in Munich Front Page
Marlis Petersen, Kirill Petrenko and Krzysztof Warlikowski
By: - Jul 26th, 2021The Munich State Opera is presenting Salome, the opera by Richard Strauss. The set is dark, yet in full view as we enter the opera house. A man is fidgeting over a desk deep in the set. On it sits a banker’s lamp with its classic green hood. A patent for this lamp was taken out in 1909. In a prologue to the opera, Mahler songs are being sung, another brief clue to date the monumental, elegant setting created by Malgorzata Szczesniak.
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Boston Lyric Opera Launches desert in Front Page
Opera Mini Series in Association with Long Beach Opera
By: - Jul 21st, 2021Now available at opera box.tv, Boston Lyric Opera offers a mysterious, death-defying plunge into streaming opera. The eight part mini series stars Isabel Leonard and Talise Trevigne as a married lesbian couple who run a desert Inn, where people can be reunited with their dead loves, like a real world ouija board set in Palm Springs. The Inn sign is not missing a letter. The eerie Bates Motel missed some in the TV series. The kinky Chelsea, where traditional residents were like some of the characters in this series, also is distinguished by missing letters. What is not missing here is terrific music, drama and singing and not singing actors. James Darrah brings his film background and gifts to a wild opera moment.
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Tristan and Isolde in Munich Front Page
Petrenko and Company Take Us Into the Beyond
By: - Jul 15th, 2021Kirill Petrenko and Jonas Kaufmann are still standing after four performances of the grueling Tristan and Isolde in Munich. In 1869, the New York Times reported that Wagner’s music was driving people to insanity and suicide. “We learn from Munich that Herr Eberle, the piano-forte conductor, has gone mad over Tristan and Isolde and it is known that rehearsals of this unique opera had previously killed a celebrated German tenor, Ludwig Schnorr.” Familiarity has made this opera an all the more thrilling experience.
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Tannhäuser at the Munich State Opera Front Page
Awakening to Dissolute Pleasures
By: - Jul 12th, 2021The Munich Opera House may not be the house that Wagner built, but it was an important venue in his career, a place where he conducted, and where his works were premiered. King Ludwig II insisted that the first two episodes of the Ring premiere here. Wagner had hoped to withhold them for his new Festival Theatre at Bayreuth. Tannhäuser, whose 2017 production in being reprised in Munich’s annual festival, was an immediate favorite of Ludwig, Wagner’s sponsor and savior.
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The Medici Portraits and Politics Front Page
Daniel Kershaw Installs Masterpieces at the Met
By: - Jul 08th, 2021A major exhibition of portrait painting spanning the decades between 1512-1570, seems to me a risky proposition. A great idea for scholars, students and serious amateurs of art history, but usually not a show that would attract the general public. This one is different, thanks in part to a first-rate installation by Daniel Kershaw, the Met’s senior exhibition designer.
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Close Encounters with Music in the Berkshires Front Page
Yehuda Hanani Programs for Listening Pleasure
By: - Jun 27th, 2021One of the treasures of the Berkshires is Close Encounters with Music, the brainchild of premiere cellist Yehuda Hanani. Close Encounters performs in nooks and crannies around the Berkshires and also in more prominent venues like the modern Osawa Hall designed by William Rawn of Boston, who went on to create much the same successful combination of indoor and outdoor space in Sonoma County, California. Concerts are performed in the charming turn-of the-century Mahaiwe in Great Barrington. Conceived by Joseph Mcarthur Vance, this hall was brilliantly updated by Hugh Hardy.
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Berlin Philharmonic Live at Waldbuhne Front Page
Bernstein, Williams and Gershwin Featured
By: - Jun 27th, 2021Berlin Philharmonic had its big season finale in Waldbühne Stadium, Olympic Park, Berlin. Gershwin, Bernstein and John Williams were featured on a program re-introducing the Berlin Philharmonic live and to their live audience. Wayne Marshall conducted, and performed the Rhapsody in Blue. Martin Grobinger, a percussionist, was featured in a John Williams’ The Special Edition.
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Nancy Rhodes Champions American Opera Front Page
Encompass Opera Theatre Produced American First
By: - Jun 21st, 2021Nancy Rhodes, founder and artistic director of Encompass New Opera Theatre, led a Zoom for an international audience of teachers. Rhodes formed Encompass just as the women’s movement was blossoming. There are special women in the American music world who have soldiered on in their professions, whatever complications were created by gender. Bursting onto the scene at about the same time as Gloria Steinem, Nancy Rhodes created an innovative company..
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FEVER: A 1981 Photographic Time Capsule Front Page
Allen Frame’s Portraits of New York Friends Before AIDS
By: - Jun 17th, 2021In this new book of color photographs, all shot in 1981, Allen Frame attempts to revisit a zeitgeist that had given rise to an aesthetic that was distinctly New York. The distinctiveness was related to a circle of friends, many – though not all of them - gay men, who were making art at a specific moment in New York’s history. FEVER is Frame’s personal documentary of that time, before the deepening tragedy of AIDS that would claim the lives of many of the young artists pictured in this book.
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Tania Leon Wins 2021 Pulitzer for Music Front Page
Stride Premiered by the NY Philharmonic Before Pandemic Struck
By: - Jun 12th, 2021Tania Leon has been awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for music for Stride, commissionedb by Project 19 of the New York Philharmonic. The project commissioned work by women composers.
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