They Don’t Always Walk on Water

Which is good because sometimes I just want to kill my literary idols for making it look so easy…

I Love European TV

Specifically, the talk shows…

Kitty Likes to Scratch a Little Bit

Jason Bateman is my hero.  And an opster (and thanks to publicists Christina Jensen and Amanda Ameer for spreading this video like a prom queen’s legs):

And a Tar Who Ploughs the Water

Why yes, that IS Todd Rundgren, Taj Mahal and Michele Gray singing “Never Mind the Why and Wherefore” on Night Music. My favourite part is when Todd is whispering Taj’s lyrics into his ear.

The Nose Wears Pravda

Thank G-d for Shostakovich. And William Kentridge. The Met needs more boundary-pushing, engaging, committed productions like this:

Among the handful of quotes plastered on the curtain for The Nose, an opera by Dmitri Shostakovich that opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday night, is a line from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: “Traditions to sift,” part of a longer passage on telling a story and the “fifty deviations from a straight line” one must take to get to the heart of a story. It was a pretty apt way of describing William Kentridge’s new Met production: Not only did the visionary South African artist redefine the traditions of operatic production, he also took as many detours as possible to get there.

The deviations began immediately with the moral tapestry of a curtain, which replaced the Met’s trademark gold drapery. Before conductor Valery Gergiev reached the podium, the abstract lines of a projected video rotated to form a profile of Shostakovich, who composed the opera as a 22-year old upstart. Based on a Gogol short story, the parable of a low-level St. Petersburg official who wakes up one morning to find his titular appendage gone and running around town at a higher social rank was apropos to the climate of post-Revolutionary Russia, and wasn’t lost on the Communist Party.

The rest…here.

Trans-Siberian Baritone

Let’s get this out of the way: Déjà Vu is cheesy. Billed as a “new style of music,” a “mono-show” and the “perfect culmination of sight and sound in an epic high fantasy theatrical program filled with arias, ballads, parables [and] aerial installations,” the brainchild of baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, pictured, and composer Igor Krutoi comes out of the same musical line as the Trans-Siberian Orchestra and Josh Groban.

Cheesy? Yes, but at least it’s Fourme d’Ambert. Nursing a vodka tonic with a glow-stick cocktail stirrer in Radio City Music Hall on Saturday night, along with the entire fur-clad population of Brighton Beach, we couldn’t help but fall a bit in love with the Siberian singer.
The rest here.

The Comeback Kid

It’s March, which means time for my first cover story with Classical Singer, interviewing Roberto Alagna:

“It’s easy to hypothesize that his early exposure to discord in his neighborhood environment prepared Alagna for the pressures of his career. Seeing suburban factory workers strike in response to student clashes with the police isn’t drastically far off from leaving the stage of La Scala: what it boils down to is self-preservation and integrity, artistic and otherwise. The incident adds to his Mick Jagger-esque, “Street Fighting Man” persona—but spend enough time with Alagna and the press bravado gives way to a man who does not go for two days without singing, enjoys his work, and strives to bring opera to a wide audience.”

The full story here.

The Year so Far…in Print

• Three years ago, TONY heralded the age of avant-nerdism. Since then, it’s been gratifying to see the realm of classical music geekery spawn a new breed of musical omnivore we’ve dubbed the opster (that’s opera + hipster). Devouring everything from Jean Baptiste Lully to John Adams, opsters have swelled in number thanks to another darling trend: taking opera out of the opera house. What better way, then, to expand the avant-nerd fold than by combining opera with that other beacon of geekiness, astronomy? The perennially promising Gotham Chamber Opera does just that starting on Tuesday 19 by placing Haydn’s 1777 opera, Il Mondo della Luna (“The World on the Moon”), in the site-specific and oh-so-apropros Hayden Planetarium.
• Bold questions with F. Murray Abraham, Oscar-winning actor, accidental musicologist, debutant singer. TONY: Mozart of Salieri? Abraham: That’s not fair.
• Prism Quartet’s Breath Beneath in Review: If Etezady took her inspiration from anthropology, Kuster thrives in the world of architecture, here creating a rich cityscape of sound. The instruments are greater than the sum of their parts, at various turns creating a full orchestral sound.
• “I’ve thought a lot about occlumency when I’m playing,” said Simone Dinnerstein. So naturally, at her Miller concert in January, we gave her the complete set of Stephen Fry reading Harry Potter
• The Olympics round-up of Classical Music: the Netherlands, Israel, Italy and more…and what musician said their Wheaties box would be Cap’n Crunch with Crunchberries.
• On Missy Mazzoli and my apparent drinking problem. This ran in our Brooklyn vs. Manhattan issue, which included a bunch of us staffers ranking the boroughs for their respective offerings. I was one of three to say B > M. Though I live in Queens so I have a third bias.
• Since last month, we’ve been getting our share of Valery Gergiev in New York. Can you start without reading this Primer on the Mariinsky maestro? Perhaps. But why would you want to?

The Year So Far…on The Volume

• “Imagine Audrey Tautou with high Cs”: Magali Léger makes her New York debut at the Merkin Concert Hall with an all-too-brief recital of works by the Chevalier de Saint Georges. The Met ought to snap her up.
• Hilary Hahn (pictured) and her Bach Party at (Le) Poisson Rouge: “Essentially, the violin is a piece of hollowed-out wood with four strings attached to it via another piece of wood. But get it in the right hands, especially the hands of Hilary Hahn, and it contains a cathedral of sound.”
• The mirror that reflects the light: Le Poème Harmonique at St. Mary the Virgin.
• I sat in the same room as Marilyn Horne and James Taylor. Only at Carnegie Hall.
• Speaking of Carnegie…Boulez vous coucher avec moi? CSO at Stern.

• Gilles Vonsattel (above) smashed his finger at a Bargemusic concert that was nothing short of energizing. Here’s hoping his Europe-only CD of Beethoven comes out soon in the U.S. Great listen. It was really great that night to see a disproportionate number of young, hip couples enjoying a Friday night concert (the program from which I used as a backdrop to shoot my newly-acquired engagement ring).
• Dutch treats: Janine Jansen and the Concertgebouw at Carnegie Hall (her Mart Visser dress, pictured in the post, has served as the inspiration for my wedding frock) and the Rotterdam Phil with Yannick Nézet-Séguin at Avery Fisher Hall.
• The Hun Wears Prada: Attila at the Met.
• Even Renee Fleming’s crossover crosses over.
• Watch out for Daníel Bjarnason this year. Trust me on this one.

Philip Langridge 1939-2010

When I was working in the institutional side of opera, I started out interning at the Classical Opera Company of London. Working for them included being on-hand at a rehearsal at the house of one of our trustees for a Wigmore concert. Philip Langridge was a featured singer. I’d seen him a few weeks earlier in the same house, giving a recital of Britten and Mozart, making one relevant to the other. He was warm and emphatic, the young(er) singers of the company were clearly in love with working alongside him and you could see that he got as much from working with them as the opposite. He also taught a starstruck American girl in her early 20s, how to make a proper cup of tea on one rehearsal break. It was so devastatingly British.

Philip, I may still refuse milk in my tea, but I’m a better person for knowing the other side.