Susan Hall
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Recent Articles:
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Dell'Arte's Calisto and Cunning Vixen Front Page
Two Worlds Mix and Match in Opera
By: - Aug 26th, 2017Separated by almost three hundred the years, the full productions of Dell’Arte’s annual festival both looked at how two worlds mix and match in Calisto and The Cunning Vixen. Both productions were at once delightful and moving.
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Dell'Arte Opera Ensemble Untamed Front Page
Impeccable Opera Produced with Verve
By: - Aug 25th, 2017Opera is a form comprised of many elements. Seldom are all of them addressed successfully. Dell'Arte Opera Ensemble succeeds in producing intriguing and complex theater with attention to every detail. How do they do it, opera after opera, concert after concert?
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Ivan Fischer's Don Giovanni Front Page
Mozart at his Most Sublime
By: - Aug 20th, 2017Ivan Fischer, the great Hungarian conductor, returns to Mozart's original version of Don Giovanni. Putting on a production from the Don's point of view, everything is a body. Furniture, peasants, chorus all are wearing white body suits and often strike arresting poses. This concept invites us to listen more closely to the terrific Budapest Festival Orchestra and the singers.
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Gil Shaham Plays Tchaikovsky Front Page
Langrée Leads Mostly Mozart
By: - Aug 18th, 2017Mostly Mozart programs with intent. While the most obvious connections between a program including Prokovief's 1st Symphony, Mozart's 25th and the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto may be their bridge positions between musical periods, the Classical, Romantic and Neoclassical, more than a ladder rung binds these pieces. Exuberant turns of phrase, often taken at a tear, provide their texture. Violinist Gil Shaham uses his consummate pyrotechnics on behalf of the music.
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Kirill Gerstein. at Mostly Mozart Front Page
Celebrating the love triangle of Robert and Clara Schumann and Brahms
By: - Aug 17th, 2017The trials and tribulations of the great Romantic composers have always fascinated the classical music-loving public. From the extramarital wanderings of Richard Wagner to Frederic Chopin's stormy relationship with the lady novelist George Sand, it has provided fodder for intermission conversation over coffee and small overpriced sandwiches. Arguably, the most famous triangle relationship was between three composers: Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann (née Wieck) and Johannes Brahms.
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Gershwin at 59E59 Theaters Front Page
Anderson Twins Play
By: - Aug 17th, 2017The Anderson Brothers, consummate musicians, make the case for Gershwin's popularity by citing his access to the new media, radio. The songs themselves are enough to convince us. Joined by Molly Ryan, who has a perfectly beautiful voice, the fabled composer entrances.
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International Contemporary Ensemble at Mostly Mozart Front Page
How Forests Think
By: - Aug 14th, 2017International Contemporary Ensemble is the go-to group for the performance of contemporary music.They presentedd three important contemporary composers as part of the Mostly Mozart Festival.
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Ian Bostridge Reimagines Winterreise Front Page
Mostly Mozart Offers Hans Zender's Interpretation
By: - Aug 12th, 2017Netia Jones has combined tenor Ian Bostridge's thirty year passion and a brilliant "compositional interpretation" of the piano music for orchestra into a hydra-headed tour de force with video, sets and the suggestion of cabaret. Bostridge has the perfect voice for the wanderer, a stranger at the start and at the end. The staging works well.
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Lawrence Brownlee at the Park Avenue Armory Front Page
Myra Huang and Jason Moran, Piano Partners
By: - Aug 12th, 2017Lawrence Brownlee, tenor, showed us his stuff, ranging from the baroque to Lead Belly.. We changed rooms at the Park Avenue Armory, moving from the regal Officers Room to the Veterans Room as we moved forward in musical time. At the Armory, music is presented for pleasure, for illumination and surprise.
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Festival of Contemporary Music Opens Front Page
Tanglewood's Annual Offering
By: - Aug 12th, 2017The Festival of Contemporary Music is a highlight of the Tanglewood season. Curators assemble concerts from commissioned works and also from composers whose works form the canon of the contemporary music scene. Opening night suggested how rich this repertoire has become.
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Joshua Bell and Steven Isserlis Mostly Mozart Front Page
Reconciliation, Restitution and Reformation
By: - Aug 08th, 2017This concert at Mostly Mozart was billed as a musical offering from Brahms, Bach and Mendelssohn. It seemed a stretch to hear these works without the centerpiece composer featured, except as an artist who liked to spell Bach's name in notes. The spirit was Mozartian, full of joy and inviting melodies, Featuring Joshua Bell and Steven Isserlis as soloists, who brought Schumann to the table in the slow movement of his violin concerto, it was a rich evening of music. A delightful offering.
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JACK Quartet at the Whitney Museum Front Page
Accompanying Alexander Calder
By: - Aug 06th, 2017Members of the JACK Quartet are scattered across the eighth floor exhibit space at the Whitney Museum in which many Alexander Calder mobiles hang and stand. In the center of the room on the south wall, cellist Jay Campbell and violinist Austin Wulliman are conventionally seated with their music stands before them. They do not seem to notice violinist Christopher Otto who stands at the east entrance, only a music stand dividing him from a roaming, and finally seated and standing-still audience. At another entrance Jay Pickford Richards, violist, is completely in his own world, oblivious to in your face cameras, and the wandering audience. John Cage wrote the Quartet they will perform, not for a quartet, but for four soloists.
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Mostly Mozart at Lincoln Center Front Page
Mozart Embraces Lully and Lang
By: - Aug 02nd, 2017Percussion was the theme of the Mostly Mozart concert featuring also David Lang. Mozart used kettle drums to underiine a point. In his comic opera, Abduction from the Seraglio, he also used triangle, cymbals and a bass drum to suggest the exotic Turkish locale. Jean-Baptiste Lully added percussion for the elevation of a Molière character to noble man. It was an inspired selection of music to surround David Lang's "man made" created to show how elemental percussion instruments are heard by their fancier orchestral counterparts.
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Dimitrij by Dvorak at Bard's SummerScape Front Page
Leon Botstein Conduts an Underdog Opera
By: - Jul 31st, 2017Leon Botstein, a great American educator and music polymath, makes the case for underexposed compositions by known and unknown composers. This year, he presents Anton Dvo?ák's Dimitrij as a feature of the Bard SummerScape Festival.
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Katrin Hilbe Directs Dear Jane Front Page
Joan Beber Play Mounted at the Clurman
By: - Jul 28th, 2017Joan Beber has tackled an intimate part of her own life, the death of a twin sister, in her new play, Dear Jane. Formed as a letter to her deceased sibling, Beber creates many memorable characters. Katrin Hilbe directs flawlessly.
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Christian Marclay Performs Calder Front Page
Small Sphere, Heavy Sphere at the Whitney
By: - Jul 24th, 2017Small Sphere, Large Sphere was Alexander Calder's first mobile construction. Hanging in the center of the Hess Theater at the Whitney Museum in New York, it is set in motion, not only to delight the eye, but the ear as well. Christian Marclay makes music with the small wooded sphere carved by Calder.
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Rossini Mass at Caramoor Front Page
Rachelle Jonck Conducts Bel Canto Young Artists
By: - Jul 24th, 2017Rossini stopped writing operas at the age of 37. He did not compose again for decades. When he was able to move back to Paris, and build a country home in Passy with his second wife, he took up his composer’s pen again. To the end of his life, he composed over 200 works which he gave the umbrella title Sins of Old Age. He was touching up the Petite Messe Solennelle when he died in 1868.
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Romy Nordlinger Delves into Nazirova Front Page
Woman Filmmaker's Career Dramatized
By: - Jul 23rd, 2017Alla Nazirova was a theater and film original, who came to the US and stormed Broadway Leaving for Hollywood, she became Tinseltown's highest paid talent. She was Queen of Sapphic Los Angeles and that cost her. Now she is brought to life by Romy Nordlinger at 59E59 Theaters.
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CompagnieXY at Lincoln Center Front Page
French Acrobats Create Dance
By: - Jul 21st, 2017In N'est Pas Le Minuit by Compagnie XY, a group of acrobats whose physical feats demands cooperation and trust. They take that spirit and make it into a global miniature.
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Syrian Drama at Lincoln Center Festival Front Page
Into the Heart of Damascus
By: - Jul 20th, 2017Syrians are spreading across the world as civil war rages on in their country. We who greet, house and share our countries with them are curious about the country from which they have come and what it feel like to live there during this period of torture and destruction. The theater of Syria helps us understand what prompts exodus.
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East of Edinburgh New Plays at 59E59th Front Page
Two Matters of Life and Death
By: - Jul 15th, 201759 East 59th Street Theaters is presenting New York’s annual Edinburgh Festival Preview. The acting in the plays is terrific. While these are works in process, the directors give us engaging productions on provocative themes.
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Nelsons and his Wife Leave New Met Tosca Front Page
See Them at Tanglewood on August 26th
By: - Jul 14th, 2017The new Met Tosca will premier with James Levine replacing Andris Nelsons at the helm. Kristine Opolais stepped out of the title role. They are together in Tanglewood for what promise to be a starry evening on August 26th.
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Sleeping Water by Saburo Teshigawara Dance
Transforming Dance at the Rose Theatre
By: - Jul 14th, 2017Saburo Teshigawara of Karas is a choreographer with a special vocabularly, focusing on the arms and hands, which we discover are the most expressive parts of the body.
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William S. Burroughs Naked Lunch with Live Score Front Page
When Typewriters Talk
By: - Jul 13th, 2017Naked Lunch is never going to be a mainstream film, but the opportunity to peer into the twisty subconscious of the creative mind and the keen brilliance of a jazzman the caliber of Ornette Coleman was a perfect coming together of two seemingly opposed forces. And no Interzone insectoid typewriter would argue with that.
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Carmen Clicks at Prelude to Performance Front Page
Martina Arroyo Brings Emerging Talent on Stage
By: - Jul 09th, 2017Martina Arroyo, spinto soprano supreme, has committed a foundation in her name to the production of operas in which young talent, on the cups of careers, are given a chance to perform. At the Danny Kaye Theater in New York, George Bizet's Carmen was as fresh and compelling as any recent performance of this delicious warhorse.
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