Matthew Gurewitsch

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review of Die Entführung aus dem Serail

March 2014 • Opera News

Roles of saints, demons, and craggy souls grappling with last things came naturally to Finnish basso Martti Talvela. His timbre seemed primeval, his aura of another world. Not so incidentally, he stood a towering six foot seven inches tall. He was dancing at his daughter's wedding a quarter century ago when death struck him down at age fifty-four, an end his beloved Dostoyevsky could not have staged more cruelly.

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What Will Happen to Brooklyn's Shrine to Enrico Caruso?

February 4, 2014 • Wall Street Journal

Brooklyn, N.Y.

A torrential raconteur, Aldo Mancusi traces what he calls his magnificent obsession to his father, Everisto, who in 1920 emigrated from Campania, Italy, to this, New York's most populous borough, while still in his teens. "He had about 70 Caruso records that he would crank up when I was 4, 3, 2, 1," Aldo said one recent morning. As curator and founder of the shrine grandiloquently styled the Enrico Caruso Museum of America, he was about to turn back the clock, flourishing a shellac disc dating to November 1902, the year the peerless Neapolitan tenor began recording.

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review of Wolfgang Rihm: Dionysos

February 2014 • Opera News

In a program note for the original production of Dionysos, documented on this new release from Unitel, the composer/librettist Wolfgang Rihm touched on elements of the comic that automatically arise when mythical characters are projected on historical ones, however tragic their destinies. "I picture Laurel and Hardy at the edge of a high-rise roof," he noted parenthetically, "gripped by the fear of falling."

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Crowning glory or can of worms? (Whose head is it, anyway?)

January 13, 2014 at 10:10 pm

One difference between actors and other people may be the degree to which they obsess about hair. A decade ago, Colin Farrell speculated that the blond mane visited on him in Oliver Stone's Alexander torpedoed the whole movie. Farrell's dark, wavy locks in the current Saving Mr. Banks struck me as off, too, though forgettably so. The do people remember from that one would be the tight perm worn by Emma Thompson.

"People would bleat in the streets as I went by!," the actress has said. "I didn't have sex for six months." At least audiences were spared the sight of her Mrs. P. L. Travers in curlers—an embarrassment Bradley Cooper, in American Hustle, managed to mine for comic gold.

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A Hawaiian Grand Tour

December 25, 2013 • Wall Street Journal

Honolulu

Santa arrives at Waikiki Beach by outrigger canoe, in fur-trimmed board shorts. But today it's pouring, or yesterday you caught a sunburn. Now what?

For the first family, who have settled in for their annual Christmas break on the islands, the same as for the jumbo-jetloads of other seasonal visitors, the spell of Hawaii is woven of its landscapes, climate and aloha spirit. Who expects Culture of the Grand Tour variety? Yet the Honolulu Museum of Art offers just that, as Sasha and Malia Obama could tell you from personal experience.

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