Category Archives: A Little Night Music

Inevitably, but at glacial pace, the art of Robert Wilson moves westward. In European theater, his work has exerted a volcanic influence over the past three decades. In New York, or at least in Brooklyn, he has maintained a stronghold … Continue reading →

Photo by Viaamse Opera, Annemie Augustijns Haydn at the Bowl on one balmy night, Mozart at the Music Center on another: The segue between seasons here is less a meteorological matter than sartorial, and the transition this time has been … Continue reading →

Nirvana looms for the organic crowd – not the veggies-and-sprouts folks this time, but the seekers of ecstasy in the sounds of the “world’s most perfect” (and, thus, least musical) instrument, the devotees of Diggle and Thistlethwaite. This is the … Continue reading →

The best thing about this job – one of the best things, anyhow – is the chance it affords me to write about Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, as often as I like. I got to write about it last … Continue reading →

Leonard Bernstein’s Mass dates from the fade-out of his years as an important composer. After 1971 there would be the pathetic operatic venture A Quiet Place, the failed Broadway project 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and its various spinoffs, and several inconsequential … Continue reading →

The film scores of Nino Rota constitute a body of lyric excellence that carries forward the dramatic vernacular of his Italian forebears into the medium of his own time. I say this, of course, with some trepidation; I have only … Continue reading →

Carlos Kleiber’s recent passing left no noticeable tremors on the musical landscape. He had suffered, the obituary notices read, from a “long-term illness,” but the world had suffered from his even longer-term absence; his last performances of any consequence were … Continue reading →

Photo by Decca/Andrew Eccles The sound of Renée Fleming in song belongs on that shortlist of amenities – sunset through the Golden Gate, dinner at Matsuhisa – that make life on this planet preferable to all others. Even through the … Continue reading →

Photo by Christine Alcino In the matter of togetherness programmed in heaven, try this for a night at the Hollywood Bowl: Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, with its roistering, rolling E-flat piano arpeggios before intermission; John Adams’ Grand Pianola Music, with its … Continue reading →

The night sky in midsummer over the Athenian forest is fully dark; over Sweden’s northern latitudes it maintains a dusky twilight streaked with sunset reds. By delicious happenstance, both phenomena have been ours to observe and marvel at lately: the … Continue reading →