MCANA Hosted Columns

By Susan Brodie: Toi Toi Toi!

Opera lovers world-wide travel to this remote corner of Bavaria to experience Richard Wagner's work in the house the Meister built to give his works in ideal conditions. But the would-be Wagner pilgrim will find that off-stage drama of history colors the Bayreuth experience as much as the music.

From a letter published in the Chicago Daily Tribune, December 6, 1891. Long, but worth it.   "It was at Nuremberg that we struck the inundation of music-mad strangers that was rolling down upon Bayreuth. It had been long since we had seen such multitudes of excited and struggling people. It took a good half-hour to pack them and pair them into the train--and it was the longest train we have yet seen in Europe. Nuremberg had been witnessing this sort of experience a couple of times a day for about two weeks. It

   Here are some follow-ups to previous posts that you may or may not have seen in this blog:      Pierre Boulez's Mahler cycle was completed last year with the release of the video of Des Knaben Wunderhorn and the Adagio from the Symphony No. 10 – or was it?  Now we have an addenda of sorts, not part of the official cycle but still a something's extra, a live performance of Das Klagende Lied from the opening concert of last year's Salzburg Festival (C Major DVD or

     Thanks to the usual early-summer lull in the concert season, I have just finished reading the long-awaited fourth volume of Robert A. Caro's massively eloquent biography of Lyndon Johnson, The Passage Of Power – and with one more volume to go, one can only hope that he and we live long enough to see the end of it.  There is no finer writer of political biographies working today; Caro's mastery of rhetoric, his use of repetition for purposes of flow as well as reminding us of past material,

By Richard S. Ginell

The distance between Dresden and Leipzig is only 62 miles, and to see one city without visiting the other would seem to be an opportunity missed if you have the time.  While they are amazingly similar in population currently – Dresden as of 2010 has 523,000 residents while Leipzig comes within a whisker of that total at 522,000! – and both have deep connections with the great composers, they are not twin cities.  Leipzig is more of a trade center with a more bustling street vibe; it was also a book

     Looking at Dresden today –  with the Baroque splendor of the restored Semperoper and Frauenkirche in the same neighborhood as drab Communist architecture and a modern indoor shopping mall off the Altmarkt that could be located anywhere – you are confronted with the abrupt clash between the very old, the very new, and the recent past. It is the home of Raphael's "Sistine Madonna;" the city where "Der Fliegende Holländer," "Tannhäuser,"

     Last October, Southwest Chamber Music kicked off its 25th anniversary season with a monster of a work, Ten Freedom Summers by jazz trumpeter, avant-garde classical composer and CalArts faculty member Wadada Leo Smith. It was a magnum opus in every sense –  19 compositions requiring three nights to perform, 34 years in the making, rolling avant-garde jazz and classical elements into one ball, purporting to capture the psychological and spiritual meanings of not only the Civil Rights movement in

By Roy C. Dicks: What's the Score?

The North Carolina Symphony gave fourteen classical concerts on its 2011-12 Raleigh series. I reviewed five of them for the Raleigh News & Observer. Here they are, in reverse chronological order, starting with the May 11 season finale.

     I realize that there is a brave new world of changing formats out there, a massive transition from physical to digital with supposedly washed-up technologies like vinyl LPs on the comeback trail.  Even so, Deutsche Grammophon's release schedule for its caliente conducting star, Gustavo Dudamel, has taken a turn toward the bizarre this year.      "Discoveries" – a 2009 hodge-podge of isolated tracks wrenched from Dudamel's earlier albums, with a few

By Roy C. Dicks: What's the Score?

Raleigh-based North Carolina Opera finished its 2011-2012 season with a semi-staged concert performance of Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” in Meymandi Concert Hall, one of the company’s strongest showings yet in its fledgling two seasons.      Born of two previous Raleigh-based companies, Opera Company of North Carolina and Capital Opera, North Carolina Opera has worked to find its proper balance in offering fully staged grand opera,

      The wind was howling, the sky was a gloomy dark grey, the thermometer was stuck at 28 degrees, and the snow came tumbling down, coating the trees in the front yard with white crystals better suited for the dead of winter than the middle of spring ...  Sounds like the start of a bad novel, but that was the scene outside my front glass door a couple of weekends ago as I left Frazier Park (elev. 5,000 feet)  to attend the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Schubertiade in Walt Disney Concert Hall the week of April 15.

    Are classical CDs and DVDs going out of style? Not in the Bay Area, where at least two organizations continue to regularly pour out live recordings of their musical offerings on their own labels on paradoxically old-fashioned, state-of-the-art physical media.       The San Francisco Symphony observed its centennial with a gala season-opening concert last September that was shown on PBS here a couple of weeks ago and has found its way onto a DVD (SFS Media).  It isn't quite the complete

    Segueing over to one of my other musical passions, jazz, I recently found three bound volumes of Down Beat magazine's jazz record reviews in a Simi Valley antique shop, of all places.  The books cover all of the reviews that DB printed in 1959, 1960 and 1962 – in other words, right at the heart of what many scribes and record company factotums now consider to be jazz's artistic high-water mark  (one can debate that, but there's little doubt this was one of the richest periods).    

  In my fourth season of regular attendance at the Paris Opera, I've recently had some, ah, interesting experiences buying tickets. I bought a fairly last minute seat, at the box office, to a performance of Salome on September 14. I asked whether there were any discounts for regular customers but was told no, so I paid rather more than I wanted to just to satisfy my curiosity about the soprano (scroll down to read my post from 10/19/11). The show wasn't a complete disaster, but on the whole I wish I'd saved my

    The gears are cranking up already for next year's Wagner bicentennial, and we can probably expect a slew of new videos from the currently dominant school of regietheatre – sometimes known as Eurotrash.  Yet PentaTone, the outfit that has resurrected many a 1970s-vintage Philips recording in SACD surround-sound, is bucking that trend by gradually issuing new recordings of all ten Wagner repertory operas in audio only, recording concert performances live in the Berlin Philharmonie, one per

    You've probably heard: Canadian folk-rocker and opera fan Rufus Wainwright wrote an opera. Prima Donna opened its third run in New York City Opera's production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Sunday (February 19). It's better than I expected but still a mixed bag.   It's the story of a reclusive semi-retired diva's attempted comeback in the commissioned opera which, confusingly, was both her greatest triumph and her downfall, as she lost her voice during its single performance

     Gustavo Dudamel wanted to complete his Mahler Project with a performance of the Eighth Symphony that mirrored the 1910 premiere of the piece – with a thousand or more performers.  There was a little problem, though – Walt Disney Concert Hall only seats 2,265 customers, and with so many performers taking up so much room, not many tickets would be available. Also, it was winter – and though temperatures turned out to be on the mild side, who would take a chance on booking a big outdoor arena many

    Here in Los Angeles – suddenly the Mahler capital of the world for three-and-a-half weeks in winter – we are two-thirds of the way through Gustavo Dudamel's audacious journey from memory through all nine completed symphonies, plus the Adagio from the Tenth and Songs Of A Wayfarer. Time to take a breather before resuming the Mahlerthon, and gather a few thoughts together:  – As a rule of the thumb, the best performances have been of those symphonies with which Dudamel has had the most

  The expectations we carry into a performance inevitably influence our response to that event. In 2011 I spent many wonderful evenings in concert halls and theaters, but sometimes the show felt perhaps not as special as I wanted, simply because I expected so much. However, I had a number of happy surprises, when I dragged into a concert or opera almost reluctantly and the evening turned out to be quite special. So instead of a Top 10, here in chronological order are ten "sleepers": performances that I attended with little

The first performance of the prologue to a hitherto-unknown unfinished Shostakovich opera, "Orango," arrived at Walt Disney Concert Hall Dec. 2-4 – and it was everything I had hoped it would be.   "Orango" dates from 1932, when Shostakovich was still in prime satirical mode before the darkness of Pravda's denunciation shrouded his life a few years later.  The prologue introduces the proposed opera much the way Berg's "Lulu" begins – an "entertainer" leads spectators