‘ Even now, so many decades after the composers of the Second Viennese School were active, the music of Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) and his pupils Alban Berg (1885-1935), the creator of Wozzeck, and Anton von Webern (1883-1945) is difficult for many audiences to understand and not strikingly popular. The Twelve-Tone Technique which Schoenberg invented in […]
Does classical music have much to contribute to the political debate? I consider the question in ” When Music Matters” http://symphonyinternational.net/when-music-matters-the-political-image-of-an-orchestra/
When it seemed that Wagner’s music-dramas were un-toppable, his one-time assistant Engelbert Humperdinck showed that the way forward lay in going back to folk-tunes and fairytales, a world delightfully captured in Richard Sparks’ new English translation of Adelheid Wette’s libretto. But for World War I, he might have ended up in Australia. These were among […]
I love explicit drama but I also love the perceptible processes of musical minimalism. These two emotions weighed on my mind as I reviewed LA Opera’s recent production of Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha” for OperaWire.
Dark and unremitting and politically astute, I think “Don Carlo” may be Verdi’s greatest opera. My review of LA Opera’s recent “Don Carlo” in OperaWire.
Musicologist critics of Puccini’s “Tosca” may be discounting its theatrical viability, as I argued in my article for San Francisco Opera’s August production.
In honour of the Central Australian Aboriginal Women’s Choir’s forthcoming concerts in Washington, and in honour of their recent film, The Song Keepers, I re-publish this 2003 article about the premiere of Journey to Horseshoe Bend, which featured one of their predecessor organizations, the Ntaria Ladies Choir. (Please be advised that this article may contain […]
Have film screenings with live orchestra really been around so long? Jon Burlingame writing in Variety in 2013[1], cites a 1987 live screening of Eisenstein and Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky by the Los Angeles Philharmonic as the ‘light bulb’ moment when Steven Linder of IMG Artists realized these could be a thing. Thirty years! Is […]
Loretta: That was so awful. Ronny: Awful? Loretta: Beautiful… sad. She died! John Patrick Shanley Moonstruck (dir. Norman Jewison, 1987) In the 1987 film, Moonstruck, Ronny Cammareri (Nicholas Cage) woos Loretta Castorini (Cher) by taking her to La bohème at ‘the Met’. In the Third Act, as the two principals on stage touch hands through […]
In Act III of Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges, the Prince has found his true-love, the last of three fantastic oranges, Princess Ninetta, and saved her with a refreshing drink. ‘At last, a real fairytale with tunes that we can hum’ sing the commentators, the ‘Lyrics’, in Tom Stoppard’s translation of Prokofiev’s libretto. Except that […]