Susan Hall
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Emmeline by Tobias Picker Front Page
Classic Contemporary Opera at Manhattan School of Music
By: - Apr 27th, 2019Manhattan School of Music mounts a superb production of Tobias Picker's Emmeline this spring. Directed by the gifted Thaddeus Strassberger, the work has been moved into the present and resonates as a universal tale. George Manahan. who conducted the world premiere of the work at Santa Fe Opera over twenty years ago, led the orchestra, revealing all the richness of the score. Young talent created unforgettable characters in this re-telling of a Greek myth.
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Hilma af Klint, The Opera Front Page
Guggenheim Presents Benjamin Staern's Chamber Opera
By: - Apr 23rd, 2019The Works & Process series at the Guggenheim Museum is full of surprise and delight. The notion that one’s experience of art can be enhanced by music is not new. Yet in the case of Hilma af Klint, the exhibit of whose works has been the sensation of the New York art season, using a chamber opera to take us inside her experience, was enormously helpful for a better understanding of the woman and her work.
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ONE Festival at Opera Omaha Front Page
Philip Glass, Ellen Reid and Charles Gounod Featured
By: - Apr 21st, 2019The ONE Festival of Opera Omaha celebrated its 2nd anniversary this year. It has already become a must visit for opera lovers throughout the world. The productions here are first rate. Bringing in James Darrah, who is a director of choice for many of the best young composers, has excited opera fans. This year did not disappoint.
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Ellen Reid Wins Pulitzer for Prism Front Page
Composer's Generosity of Spirit and Notes
By: - Apr 16th, 2019Ellen Reid has been a hot item this year. Four venues in Los Angeles commissioned work from her. Now Prism, a Beth Morrison production, has won the Pulitzer prize for music. We wandered her soundscape in Omaha created for her by Opera Omaha at the Josyln Art Museum. Distinguishing composing notes from the listener's experience, Reid brings new sounds to an audience.
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Bound by Huang Ruo at Baruch Performing Arts Center Front Page
Freshly Squeezed Opera Presents New York Premiere
By: - Apr 16th, 2019Bound, Huang Ruo's chamber opera, is produced at the Rose Nagelberg Theatre in the Baruch Performing Arts Center. Originally commissioned by Houston Grand Opera, this production is the New York premiere. It is a fresh take by Freshly Squeezed Opera. Ashley Tate who specializes in multi-media production, directs.
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All Our Children at the Sheen Center Front Page
Stephen Unwin's Play Explores Eugenics
By: - Apr 15th, 2019The Sheen Center's Black Box Theater is stacked with files containing the case records of 'defective' young people who are institutionalized and awaiting their death. All Our Children takes up a theme developed in Florian Henkel von Donnersmarck's latest film. The doctor in the film and the doctor running a clinic for children in the play, both are charged with duties best left to God. Who is to live, and who must die, is in play because upkeep is expensive and the State needs money for munitions.
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Norma Jeane Baker of Troy at The Shed Front Page
Ben Whishaw and Renee Fleming Star
By: - Apr 10th, 2019Poet Anne Carson has a special touch, embedding a conversational tone in lilting lines. While Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is billed as a melologue in which some words are sung and some spoken. It asks the question opera composers always ask: what words should be spoken, and what words sung? As a struggling writer's secretary, Fleming becomes muse, moving from speech to song. She is glorious. So too is Ben Whishaw, who moves from writer to the embodiment of Marilyn Monroe.
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Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish Front Page
Language Roots the Musical in its Native Soil
By: - Apr 08th, 2019Directer Joel Grey delivers a rare and rich revival. Fiddler on the Roof has come back, a comment and conversation in Yiddish about a time and place that indeed did shake the world. In the language of the people who lived it, this production is more rooted in their world, earthy, funny, deeply-moving.
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Jeremy Gill and Port Mande at National Sawdust Front Page
Genre-breaking jazz to Contemporary Classical
By: - Apr 08th, 2019Mark Dover and Jeremy Ajari Jordan worked Debussy, Schubert and angst into a wild evening of jazz. Jeremy Gill has a quiet about his work from which he builds and to which he then retreats. There is something satisfying in this bracket, in which we share in the rougher emotions of the interior.
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The Cradle Will Rock at Classic Stage Company Front Page
Marc Blitzstein Delivered for Our Times
By: - Mar 30th, 2019Marc Blitzstein was a critic of the music and politics of his time. Often expressing his dissatisfaction with the “privileged society” he felt dominated the creative impulses of his colleagues. As he wrote in 1936, “the unconscious (sometimes not so unconscious) prostitution of composers in today’s world is one of the sorry sights,” warning that “music in society, with us these many years, is dying of acute anachronism; and that a fresh idea, overwhelming in its implications and promise, is taking hold.” Prostitution, the exchange of one’s body for payment, became an important symbol for Blitzstein during the interwar period. It was a brash allegory for capitalism’s influence over (and failure of) the working class throughout the Great Depression.
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Choir of King's College at Saint Thomas Front Page
Lenten Season Music
By: - Mar 29th, 2019Concerts at Saint Thomas continue their 2018-19 season with a guest performance by the acclaimed Choir of King’s College, Cambridge at Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue. This marks the choir’s final North American tour with current Director of Music Stephen Cleobury, who will retire after 37 years in September. His position will be filled by current Saint Thomas Organist and Director of Music Daniel Hyde.
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The Lehman Trilogy by Stefano Massini Front Page
Sam Mendes Directs at Park Avenue Armory
By: - Mar 28th, 2019In a co-production with National Theatre and Neal Street Productions, the Park Avenue Armory is presenting a multi-generational story of the Bavarian family Lehman in America. Captivated by Ben Powers' Biblical translation of Stefano Massini's The Lehman Trilogy, director Sam Mendes has worked with three brilliant actors to create a cast of hundreds. It is a testimony to the talents of Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Ben Miles that we believe one man can be a young woman, a child, and an aging patriarch if not all at once, certainly standing next to each other.
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Richard II at DeSotelle Studios Front Page
C.A.G.E Commited to Shakespeare Realized
By: - Mar 24th, 2019DeSotelle Studios is committed to doing staged readings of eight Shakespeare plays in eight months. Richard II seems perfect for this form. Perhaps no Shakespeare play rests more securely in its lyric laurels. Rhymed couplets and parallel constructions abound for listening pleasure. The cast took full advantage under Katrin Hilbe's direction.
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Skinnamarink at New York Theater Workshop Front Page
Little Lord Skewers US Education with Style
By: - Mar 23rd, 2019Little Lord transforms the Fourth Street Theater of New York Theater Workshop into a one room schoolhouse. We the audience get to face the demons of our early education where "Run Dick Run" at the very least bored us to tears. Based on the educational theories of William McGuffey, who after roaming the midwest as an itinerant teacher, created elementary readers for grades one to six, McGuffey's texts were used throughout the US for a hundred years.
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Boston Symphony at Carnegie Hall Front Page
Thomas Adès Conducts
By: - Mar 22nd, 2019Although the first conductors were themselves composers, the wearing of both hats at the helm of a symphony orchestra is always cause for comment. On Wednesday night, the British composer Thomas Adès, who is currently in the new role of "Artistic Partner" with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, led that band at Carnegie Hall in a program featuring the New York debut of his Piano Concerto.
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Theatre of Voices at Carnegie Hall Front Page
Arvo Part and David Lang Featured
By: - Mar 21st, 2019Theatre of Voices returned to Zankel Hall in Carnegie Hall to perform the music of Arvo Pärt alongside the New York premiere of visual poems accompanied by a picture poem by Phie Ambo. No Mickey Mousing was intended. Instead the pictures were suggested by changing seasons, and a farm in Denmark. Both Pärt and David Lang were beautiful, deep meditations on nature, man's the the world's.
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Man of La Mancha in Annapolis Front Page
Patrick Gerard Lynch Plays the Don and his Creator
By: - Mar 18th, 2019Man of La Mancha acted and sung with all the passion it can arouse, is revived by the Compass Rose Theater in Annapolis, Maryland. It is a treat. While its score may be Broadway- lite, a reminder that there is hope for humans who dream is a welcome.
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Ashes by Plexus Polaris Front Page
Yngvild Aspeli Directs at HERE
By: - Mar 18th, 2019Ashes is touring the world and landed at the adventuresome theater HERE in New York. Billed as a puppet show, yet so much more, Ashes tells the tale of a pyromaniac in 1970s Norway as the story is being woven by Gaute Helvoli. In his novel Before I Burn, the author strives to tell the story of arson in his own town at the time he was a very young child. Parallels between his story, typed on a scrim and intermittently woven into Dag, the arson's story, are Biblical in dimension. Fathers and sons are the subject.
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Baruch Performing Arts Center's Spoken Songs Front Page
Spears and Argento Sung by Brian Mulligan
By: - Mar 14th, 2019Baruch Performing Arts Center presented a Thoreau song cycle by Gregory Spears and Virginia Woolf's Diaries by Dominic Argento. Spears, a phenom among contemporary composers, loves Henry David Thoreau, but found his poetry less than thrilling. Diving into his prose, he decided to take up the more difficult challenge of setting prose to music.
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HERE Presents Nick Lehane's Chimpanzee Front Page
Puppetry Moves Like No Other Form
By: - Mar 11th, 2019Chimpanzee is a delightful and superlatively moving account of memories and dreams re-captured in captivity by a primate. Nick Lehane has created this compelling portrait. From the moment lighting director Marika Kent takes us from blackness into the light on the Chimpanzee, graceful light gestures, and some searing white light suggest the chimp's changing moods as does the soundscape by Kate Marvin.
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New Federal Theater Probes Leroy aka Amiri Baraka Front Page
Weighty Ideas and Dazzling Characters Entrance
By: - Mar 10th, 2019The New Federal Theater and Castillo Theater are presenting Looking for Leroy, a fascinating and enthralling exploration of the work of Leroi Jones aka Amira Baraka. Written with a masterful combination of character detail and theoretical exploration, Larry Muhammad has created a forceful, touching and provocative work.
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Sonja Friseli's Aida Is Retired at the Met Front Page
The End of Aida As We Loved Her
By: - Mar 09th, 2019The production mounted at the Met thirty years ago is to be replaced, under the injunction: if it's not broken, break it. Sonja Friseli's Aida is perfect and satisfies audience members of all ages and all hues. Why should a new one be created? If you are having financial troubles, spend more in the wrong place?
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Aspect Foundation Concert at Italian Academy Front Page
Alexander Sitkovetsky and Wu Qian Team for Dramatic Beauty
By: - Mar 07th, 2019The Aspect Foundation is committed to making the concert experience memorable. By offering food and drink before the concert and during intermission, and selecting unusual and glistening venues, audience members are swept into their commitment to first-rate music-making. Evenings Aspect presents are unforgettable. Go to one and you will be hooked.
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Bridget Kibbey and Friends at Merkin Hall Front Page
WQXR's Terrance McKnight Hosts
By: - Mar 07th, 2019Bridget Kibbey is a superb musician on her instrument of choice, the harp. She was joined by two friends on violin and flute/recorder to perform J.S. Bach, C.P.E. Bach, Orlando de Lassus and Tarquinio Merula in Merkin Hall at the Kaufman Center in New York. The event was hosted by Terrance McKnight of WQXR.
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Christie and Les Arts Florissants at BAM Front Page
Jean-Philipppe Rameau Delights
By: - Mar 04th, 2019William Christie and his Arts Florissant created two dance/opera entertainments by Jean-Philippe Rameau at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. As usual, this group sells out in New York and it is easy to see why. Christie conducts with poise and precision. He enlists a first rate ensemble of musicians to perform period music. To this is added stylized dance and gorgeous operatic voices. In the second one act dance/opera, La Naissance d'Osiris, we saw and heard a divertissement of dances, the gavotte, sarabande and minuet among them.
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