Latest Articles and Blog Posts

A Valkyrie's Voice Flashing More Than Steel

January 20, 2012  •  The New York Times

VIENNA — In burlesque, in popular prejudice and all too often in the opera house, big-gun German opera comes off as a clash of the titans, with the roles of Brünnhilde, Isolde and Elektra constituting the soprano's triple crown. All three have scenes of great tenderness, but more often than not their defining moments are tempestuous, even savage. For a quarter-century beginning in the 1950s Birgit Nilsson of Sweden hurled their battle cries and curses with the thrust, edge and metal of so many Viking spears. Three decades after her farewell performance even opera lovers determined not to live in the past may still think that no other way will do. But where is another Nilsson?

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review of Therese Malten: Wagner's Devoted Kundry

January 18, 2012

For opera fans of a certain stripe, few keepsakes are as fragrant as a photograph of a beloved diva in one of her signature roles, personalized by a quote penned in the lady's own hand. You would expect—would you not?—something along the lofty lines of Tosca's "Vissi d'arte": I lived for art. If so, you have yet to make the acquaintance, across the Great Divide, of Therese Malten, the third, youngest by more than a decade, and possibly most bewitching leading lady from the inaugural, stage-consecrating summer of Parsifal at the shrine Wagner built to himself in the Bavarian backwater of Bayreuth. Her inscription on a postcard depicting her as Kundry, the ageless, tormented seductress she enacted? "Nie thu' ich Gutes": I never do good.

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A Communication to Wagner's Friends

January 1, 2012 at 6:39 pm

There have been innumerable cases of Ring fever far more severe than mine. According to his obituary, my old pal Sherwin Sloan took in Wagner's four-part Nibelung epic 90 times between 1975 and his death in 2010. Even so, I have been thinking about the cycle for longer than the quarter century it took Richard Wagner to write it. The list of Ring productions I have witnessed in the theater ranges from Achim Freyer's to Francesca Zambello's. Adding video, my tally comes to at least a dozen (some seen more than once), plus segments of at least five more. I cannot even guess how many more interpretations of the work I know from audio recordings alone.

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Birgit Nilsson and Hans Knappertsbusch

January 2012  •  Opera News

An opera star or two never fails to add luster to a symphonic program, at least on paper. But how are such talents best employed? Should they be showcased as visiting royalty, bearing gifts of showy arias from their own world? Or should they be integrated as humble musicians among equals, serving the oratorio or mass or other dignified vocal work at hand, whatever it may be?

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Eye on Dance at 30: Le temps retrouvé

December 30, 2011 at 2:00 am

A likely highlight of this year's Dance on Camera bash at Lincoln Center (January 27-31) will be the screening on January 28 at 6:15 p.m., a triple bill of shorts culminating in a new documentary on the ceaselessly mutating dance-athletics collective Pilobolus, often imitated yet still sui generis on the eve of its 40^th birthday. By way of setup, the docket also includes an interview from 1987, when Moses Pendleton and Jonathan Wolken, two of the troupe's cofounders, sat down after a five-year rift for a segment of the long-running talk show Eye on Dance. In an alignment of the planets that is rarer than it ought to be, Celia Ipiotis, creator and host of the series, will present the film. And in celebration of Eye on Dance in the year of its 30^th anniversary, a 23-minute loop of highlights will be running continuously in the lobby of the Walter Reade Theater for the duration of the Dance on Camera festival, with Celia on hand at scheduled times to speak and take questions.

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Books by Matthew Gurewitsch