Category Archives: A Little Night Music

Maybe it’s something I ate, or didn’t, but I’ve been feeling unusually good about new music these days, for any number of reasons. The Philharmonic has had Thomas Adès as guest composer/conductor/pianist, and after some concerts there have been crowds … Continue reading →

A Mighty Fortress Sunday morning in the devout Leipzig of Sebastian Bach, centuries before the Lutherans’ conquest of Minnesota, was an arduous if uplifting experience. The faithful gathered in one of the two main churches, St. Michael or St. Thomas, … Continue reading →

Twinkle, Twinkle . . . There is no music for piano, large-scale or small, quite like the G-major Sonata of Franz Schubert. Its first sounds tease your imagination: What instrument could Schubert possibly have had in mind, in October 1826, … Continue reading →

The Inner Music Silenced Robert Wilson’s production of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, as produced by the L.A. Opera two years ago, soared both on Puccini’s lyric urgency and on an inner music created out of Wilson’s own visions, his unique sense … Continue reading →

The Humanist Once again there is an Anniversary; I have barely gotten through the 179 CDs of Philips’ 1991 compleat Mozart, a splendid highlight of the recording industry as it then flourished. Now there will be another Mozart torrent, even … Continue reading →

Rhine Stones If you raise a questioning eyebrow at the news that the Long Beach Opera is currently offering a reasonable likeness of Richard Wagner’s 18-hour Ring of the Nibelung in something close to 10 hours, that can only mean … Continue reading →

Aching Beauty Three years ago I wrote under the spell of Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin, whose American premiere I had attended at the Santa Fe Opera. The recording that was promised at the time has now materialized, a Deutsche … Continue reading →

John ADAMS: An atomic opera in San Francisco and a multimedia Nativity last month here preserved hopes for classical music’s present and future.Heinrich BIBER: Madcap violin virtuosity from Germany’s leading composer pre-Bach. In concerts and on disc, he’s taken over … Continue reading →

The Babe Set Free At its first hearing here (March 2003, at the Old Place), El Niño was warmly received, but with one reservation almost unanimously voiced. John Adams’ musical evocation of the Nativity story is, for most of its … Continue reading →

Andsnes in Depth The Philharmonic has had the admirable idea, for the last couple of years, of inviting some of the more interesting guest artists to tarry in town for more than the usual one-week stint, to display a broader … Continue reading →