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December 13, 2019 Confidence and (The Speech) and Jimmy Carter’s America
December 13, 2019 Behind the Scenes of Broadway: “Transformations” by Broadway Close Up
December 10, 2019 Tony Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day, Directed by Oskar Eustis, at The Public Theater
December 10, 2019 Amahl and the Night Visitors at the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen—Homeless Voices Rock a Classic Soup Kitchen
December 5, 2019 A Korngold Festival! Two from the Bard Music Festival, 2019, as well as Two New Recordings

Peter Mattei

Wagner

White-shirted knights venerate the Grail, as Amfortas (Peter Mattei) holds it aloft. Gurnemanz (René Pape) kneels. Phot Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera.

François Girard’s New Production of Wagner’s Parsifal at the Met

March 30, 2013Huntley Dent

Parsifal
Richard Wagner, libretto and music
Metropolitan Opera

Production – François Girard
Set Designer – Michael Levine
Costume Designer – Thibault Vancraenenbroeck
Lighting Designer – David Finn
Video Designer – Peter Flaherty
Choreographer – Carolyn Choa
Dramaturg – Serge Lamothe…

Opera

Jon Morris, Erwin E.A. Thomas (with eagle), Peter Straka as The Tall Prisoner, and Vladimir Chmelo as The Short Prisoner. Photo Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

Janáček’s From the House of the Dead, after Dostoevsky, Patrice Chéreau, director, at the Metropolitan Opera

December 4, 2009Michael Miller

Metropolitan Opera House
November 24, 2009

From the House of the Dead
Janáček-Janáček/Dostoevsky

Filka Morozov/Kuzmich – Stefan Margita
Skuratov – Kurt Streit
Shapkin – Peter Hoare
Shishkov – Peter Mattei
Gorianchikov – Willard White
Alyeya – Eric Stoklossa
Tall Prisoner …

Opera

Don Giovanni at the Met x 2

June 1, 2009Roza Tulyaganova

Metropolitan Opera House
Don Giovanni
Mozart-Da Ponte
Conductor – Louis Langrée
Continuo: Dennis Giauque, Harpsichord
David Heiss, Cello
Mandolin Solo: Joyce Rasmussen Balint

Production – Marthe Keller
Set Designer – Michael Yeargan
Costume Designer – Christine Rabot-Pinson
Lighting Designer – …

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A Korngold Festival! Two from the Bard Music Festival, 2019, as well as Two New Recordings

Not everyone agreed about the merits of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s music, but he was the occasion of one of the most provocative Bard Music Festivals ever. Four of us have deliberated on either that or important new recordings, which add to our understanding of this sympathetic composer.

Bard Music Festival 2019: Korngold and his World

As I return to the Bard Music Festival year after year, I notice that the spaces of Olin Hall and the Fisher Center, become more crowded and sold-out notices appear ever more frequently. I also notice that I’ve seen a good many of the attendees before. There is certainly a minority who are passionately interested in one composer or his historical and cultural context and not in the others, but I am confident in saying that the core of the Bard audience consists of recidivists. Lately the choice of focal composers has shifted from the undisputed pantheon to composers who are interesting because of their cultural position in their own time. Saint-Saëns, Chávez, and Rimsky Korsakov fall into this category. The audience keeps on growing. It’s obvious that we share a broad interest in western art music, but the way in which the individual composers are presented is exploratory, and, given the presence of musicians and musicologists, bound to take a controversial course. I always leave not only knowing something I didn’t know before, but with a profound new insight, and, most important of all, questions to mull over during the months that separate us from the next Bard Festival.

A Fine New Recording of Korngold’s Masterpiece, Das Wunder der Heliane

Lovers of opera, decadence, and general excess, had reason this year to rejoice. This past summer, Bard Summerscape staged, as its centerpiece, complementary to the Bard Music Festival, Das Wunder der Heliane (The Miracle of Heliane), which is possibly the single most important work by Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957). And the work has now appeared in a sumptuous new recording (reviewed here) as well as in a much-praised DVD version from the renowned Deutsche Opera (Berlin), which indeed looks wonderful in this trailer.

A Crop of Recordings XXIX: Magnard, Bruckner, Korngold, and Vaughan Williams

Delving into the music of Alberic Magnard is to reach deep into the heart of French culture. Magnard was a subtle, aristocratic composer, trading in understatement. If you enjoy the delicate chromaticism of Gabriel Fauré, or Albert Roussel’s early works, such as his First Symphony, Poème de la forêt, you will love Magnard. If you are looking for the more obvious charms of Berlioz, Dukas, Franck or Saint-Saëns, you may be disappointed. Magnard is like Franck, but turned inward and away from Franck’s saccharine religiosity. Despite all the forte moments one could want, this is music best heard with the lights low and a log in the fireplace.

The Bard Music Festival—Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Trajectory: the Symphony in F#, Music for Hollywood, Chamber Music

After attending the fully staged performance of Korngold’s opera Das Wunder des Heliane and the concerts of the second weekend of the Bard Korngold Festival, I arrived a distinct sense of the shape of the composer’s career trajectory and of the development of his unique musical sensibility, one which I suspect the festival programmers might not have hoped to suggest. To the extent that Korngold’s name is familiar, it is owing to his powerful, compelling, and influential Hollywood film scores. The unique, invaluable Bard Music Festivals usually aim to take us beyond and behind the headlines associated with its central figures and to give us a means to re-evaluate them in a more nuanced way, in the context of their less familiar works as well as those of their contemporaries. In the case of my encounter with Korngold, however, the result was a strengthening of the general view that this composer was born to compose film scores.Up to now, Korngold’s non-film music has not been completely neglected.

A Crop of Recordings XXIX: Magnard, Bruckner, Korngold, Vaughan Williams

Korngold did not live to see his symphony achieve popularity, as many know. It premiered in serial-minded Vienna in 1954, poorly rehearsed, and immediately sank into oblivion as a holdover from the past. Korngold himself died just a few years later of heart disease. Nearly twenty years then passed before Rudolf Kempe discovered orchestral parts in the Munich Philharmonic’s score library and revived the work for a new era. This awareness wasn’t totally Kempe’s doing. A generation of college students had grown up in the meantime watching late-night swashbucklers featuring Korngold’s Hollywood scores. These audiences fell in love with the spirit of his music. It was Errol Flynn, you might say, who got young people interested in Korngold, and film score conductors like Charles Gerhardt who then followed apace with the music on LP. Today, John Wilson occupies a similar space in British musical culture, bringing to life for concert audiences music originating in film and television.

Wire and Light Legerdemain: Richard Harrington’s unique art at MCLA Gallery 51, North Adams, Massachusetts

The mysteries of these works deepen when illuminated with a spectral light slit and allowed to traverse the physiognomy of the hard-metallic torsos.

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