Susan Hall
Bio:
Recent Articles:
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TenThing Brass Comes to New York Front Page
Tine Thing Helseth's Group Dazzles with Class
By: - Mar 28th, 2017TenThing brass came to Scandanavia House. The group consisting of four trumpets, four trombones, a horn and a tuba, has been touring the US to great success. Brassy and classy, they are as infectious as they are intimate. Ten, long-stemmed musicians delight.
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American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall Front Page
Reich, Hertizberg, Prestini and Weston Rock Zankel Hall
By: - Mar 26th, 2017Contemporary classic music is thriving. No longer is the ACO alone in performing new composers. Yet over the years they have commissioned and performed contemporary classical composers when few others would.
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Ensemble Studio Theatre Presents Spill Front Page
British Petroleum's Business as Usual
By: - Mar 24th, 2017Spill makes clear its theatrical origins in the first minutes. The wife of one of the men killed in the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blowup is being interviewed. Slowly characters appear on stage and speak in bits and pieces about the events she describes. The cacophonous chorus crescendos and then bursts into flames.
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946 by Kneehigh at St. Ann's Warehouse Front Page
Emma Rice Directs Michael Morpurgo's Tale
By: - Mar 22nd, 2017The enchantments of a Kneehigh Production directed by Emma Rice are so various, unusual and satisfying that we suggest you high tail it to Dumbo and catch the show.
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Robert LePage at BAM's Harvey Theatre Front Page
Portrait of an Artist Building Stories
By: - Mar 19th, 2017What qualities would you guess are incubators of a talent like Robert LePage's? His Dad was a cab driver. He shared a room with two sisters when his grandmother moved into the already crowded apartment to die with Alzheimer's. Memory obsesses LePage. He struggles to memorize "Speak White", a radical poem which details great class divides. Yet this is LePage and you often find yourself smiling and even laughing out loud as his art takes over his pain.
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James Cohn All American Composer Front Page
Rich Brew of National, Folk, and Classical
By: - Mar 17th, 2017Joe Rosen, n crucial patron of the arts in New York City, often introduces the work of a composer who should be better known, James Cohn. Like Bartok and Dvorak, Cohn has plucked melodies from America’s folk music, adding distinctly modern disharmony, and yet capturing the rhythms, for instance, of the West.
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Mark Morris: Two Operas Front Page
An Evening of Britten and Purcell
By: - Mar 16th, 2017Mark Morris does not leave not-well-enough alone. He enlivens Benjamin Britten's Curlew River with instruments on stage as they would be in the Noh drama on which this opera is based. He places the singers in the pit for Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. On stage, dancers enact the roles to entrance and also enhance the music. Morris conducts, directs, conceives and pleases along the way.
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Ensemble Connect at Weill Recital Hall Front Page
Venice of the 17th Century Played and Sung
By: - Feb 21st, 2017Carnegie Hall includes in their celebration of Venetian music a group of young artists, Ensemble Y. Instrumentalists and singers gave great pleasure in baroque music.
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Concert Artists Guild Encores Front Page
Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall
By: - Mar 15th, 2017On a dark and stormy night when many shows were cancelled in New York, young artists who had been prize winners in competitions held by the almost seventy-year-old Concert Artists Guild, performed in the jewel like concert hall, Weill Recital Hall. Their performances radiated warmth and style.
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New York Philharmonic Performs John Adams Front Page
Happy Birthday to Tunes of Absolute Jest
By: - Mar 12th, 2017John Adams has close ties to the New York Philharmonic. He was in David Gefffen Hall to hear two works performed. In Absolute Jest a quartet formed by the principal performers of the Philharmonic was embedded, an alien force in their own home.
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Emperor Jones at Irish Repertory Theatre Front Page
Obi Abili Takes the Crown
By: - Mar 12th, 2017The Irish Repertory Theatre knows how to produce terrific plays with stunning actors and telling sets, costumes and lights. The Emperor Jones returns with a new Brutus Jones, Obi Abili. It is a smashing success.
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Cafe Sabarsky at the Neue Gallery Front Page
Out of this World Cabaret
By: - Mar 10th, 2017Serge Sabarsky was co-founded of the Neue Gallery, one of the most learned and charming places in New York. Cafe Sabarsky offers an Austrian menu. Often you can find cabaraet Artists like Rachelle Garniez performing.
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The Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie Hall Front Page
Yannick Nezet-Seguin, Masterful Storyteller
By: - Mar 07th, 2017Love battles evil in Swan Lake and Bluebeard's Castle. Yannick Nezet-Seguin, who comes to the Metropolitan Opera in 2021, is a masterful story teller, forging drama and complex pictures in the performance.of The Philadelphia Orchestra.
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St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra at Carnegie Front Page
Ambivalence of Shostakovich Apology Beautiful to Hear
By: - Mar 05th, 2017Who can play Shostakovich better than a Russian? Shostakovich’s Fifth symphony has come down to us as an apology to Stalin during a time of heightened scrutiny not only of artists but of everyone under him. Now it is thought to be a protest against Stalinist terror. Whatever its messages, and messages from Russians continue to be unclear, the music is beautiful, a classical symphony brought forward into the 20th century.
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Crackskull Row at the Irish Repertory Theatre Front Page
All Family Blood Is the Same
By: - Mar 04th, 2017Crackskull Row is an eighty-minute tone poem composed in the lilting Irish language. It is a quartet, the characters: a women, a man, their son and an angel, who is perhaps an aborted fetus of a girl who comes to life. She arrives on the tiny set, a perfect stage for this intimate yet profoundly resonating drama, by sliding down the chimney. She lands on a blood stain which sends a son to jail for 33 years and also on the spot where the fetus was deposited.
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Andris Nelsons Collaborates with BSO Front Page
Beautiful Tone, Dynamic Range and Story Telling
By: - Mar 03rd, 2017When Andris Nelsons stepped on to the Carnegie Hall stage as the last minute substitute for James Levine, we did not know that the event would be as momentous as Leonard Bernstein's last minute substitution for an aiiling Bruno Walter. Who knows how these seminal moments will be ranked in musical history. So much lies before the the young conductor. Performance after performance Nelsons and his musician collaborators from the Boston Symphony exceed themselves.
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Rockefeller Offers Hamilton Matinees Front Page
Title 1 School Children See the Best Show in Town
By: - Mar 02nd, 2017Alexander Hamilton may have created the financial system that made building John D. Rockefeller's fortune possible. Now Rockefeller money is being used to fund tickets for Title 1 school children to attend the hottest show in town, "Hamilton."
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Linda Ages at the Manhattan Theatre Club Front Page
Jamie Dee in Star Turn as Linda
By: - Feb 28th, 2017Linda comes across the pond after creating a stir on the West End. No question that the title role performance by Jamie Dee is worth the price of the ticket. Perhaps because we live in a Sephora culture in the US, the issues do not seem quite so relevant in New York. Yet Lynne Meadow directing keeps you on the edge of your seat.
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Denver's Unique Strategy to Fund the Arts Front Page
One Cent from Every Ten Dollars Spent Goes a Long Way
By: - Feb 26th, 2017There is a 0.1 percent sales tax for arts and culture in Denver’s seven-county metro area. At just one cent for every ten dollars it generates $1.85 billion annually in economic activity, creates 10,205 jobs, and stimulates $520 million in tourism.
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The Vienna Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall Front Page
Franz Welser-Möst Conducts
By: - Feb 25th, 2017Schubert tripped the light fantastic, and so too René Staar, contemporary composer and musical polymath. Strauss Richard showed us how to share whatever narcissism we have with others and make it work. Another Strauss was a fillp to the moving and delightful evening at Carnegie Hall.
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Carlisle Floyd's Prince of Players Front Page
Little Opera Stages a Beauty
By: - Feb 23rd, 2017The New York premiere of Carlisle Floyd's opera, Prince of Players, is mounted by little OPERA. The wonderful story is about a male actor who has made his livelihood playing women's roles and is out of job because King Charles II has issued an edict permitting women to play women's roles. The final outcome is surprising, but well-plotted by the composer, who is also his own librettist.
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Coronation of Poppea's Trip to Venice Front Page
Monteverdi's Last Opera Triumphs
By: - Feb 22nd, 2017Carnegie Hall has treated us with a two week virtual trip to Venice in the late 17th century. The final evening's performance was Claudio Monteverdi's last opera, L'Incoronazione di Poppea. Concerto Italiano produced a moving interpretation, ranging from camp fun to the deep contralto feelings of Ottone. Monteverdi began a tradition that lives on today in the operas of Kevin Puts, Nico Muhly and Missy Mazzoli.
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Ensemble Y at Weill Recital Hall Front Page
Venice of the 17th Century Played and Sung
By: - Feb 21st, 2017Carnegie Hall includes in their celebration of Venetian music a group of young artists, Ensemble Y. Instrumentalists and singers gave great pleasure in baroque music.
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A Jonathan Biss Carnegie Master Class Front Page
What's in a Note?
By: - Feb 19th, 2017Master classes give musicians a chance for deep listening to their performance and listeners a deeper understanding of music. Jonathan Biss is working on late compositions of composers. He thinks about near-end-of-life art. In it, he finds particular richness as he looks at the singular note, its overtones, and harmonics and chromaticism. These elements he finds drive excellent interpretations.
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Cappella Mediterranea's Monteverdi at Carnegie Front Page
Man's Damnation and Glory in Musical Poetry
By: - Feb 18th, 2017Cappella Meiterranea seduces with the wit and wisdom of Claudio Monteverdi swirling in voices and period instruments. Conducted from a bar stool by artistic director Leonardo García Alarcón, the angels and devils of history emerged from the wonderful voices of the group.
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