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By Jeff Dunn

Rossini got it half right once. He said that Wagner had “beautiful moments but awful [brutti] quarter hours.” Yes, the Ring cycle lasts for 16 or more hours over four nights, driving some folks into periodic heavy Yawnville.

Laurence Dreyfus: Wagner and the Erotic Impulse; & Nicholas Vazsonyi: Richard Wagner: Self-Promotion and the Making of a Brand By Wes Blomster* Given the incredible extent of the Wagner literature, someone must by now have written on coitus interruptus in this operatic cosmos. For - in view of the centrality of the erotic impulse in his operas and their long identification with sexual desire - it is surprising that almost none of Wagner's love-stricken

By James Bash

It's hard enough for a singer to develop an international career in opera, but imagine maintaining a family as well as a career in that demanding field. The courageous or perhaps crazy international stars who have embarked on this daunting course might consider the path of Mark Delavan.

  Just a short note about Atys, as I'll be covering this show in print when Les Arts Florissants come to Brooklyn in September. Arriving with only a 6€ "sans visibilité" ticket in hand for the May 12 opening night of the Opéra Comique revival, I was thrilled to find a subscriber with an extra ticket dead center in the third balcony. It was well worth the extra investment--this is a beautiful production to see as well as hear. The theater as usual was uncomfortably stuffy and severe

  With the maestro’s illness-plagued start now receding into a footnote, Riccardo Muti’s music directorship of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is swiftly blossoming into something special. The level of music-making I’ve witnessed in recent weeks, at Orchestra Hall in Chicago and at Carnegie Hall in New York, points to a singular meeting of minds, a rapport between conductor and orchestra that is fundamentally creative, at once artistic and intellectual. At age 69, Muti has nothing to prove musically but

  Review: “Wozzeck,” opera by Alban Berg, Metropolitan Opera, New York; “Woyzeck,” play by Georg Büchner, collaboration by About Face and Hypocrites theater companies at the Chopin Theatre, Chicago The first opera I came to know really well, as a college student, was nothing so conventionally tuneful or romantic as Verdi’s “La Traviata” or Puccini’s “La Boheme.” What nailed my attention, and nudged me down the path toward criticism, was

  Transient Glory Tenth Anniversary Concert, May 6, 2011   I first encountered these wonderful young musicians on assignment a few years ago, and I've since enjoyed their contributions to events like the 2008 Bang on A Can All Stars Marathon and the 2010 Terry Riley In C Anniversary concert in Carnegie Hall. The touchingly pure sound of young voices is irresistible to begin with; this ensemble's fearless performances of impressively difficult contemporary music is astonishing. So this isn't

Every perplexing updated opera production offers an "ah-ha" moment which gives a clue to the director's original inspiration. For the Met's new Die Walküre (seen on April 28 and May 2) it's at the beginning of the third act, when the eight eponymous warrior maidens ride the undulating girders of Robert Lepage's infamous Machine, bucking like a chorus line of mechanical bulls. For the rest of the evening, the $45 million contraption leads a rambunctious and noisy life of its own,

Review: “The Front Page,” by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur TimeLine Theatre, Chicago In its unvarnished original 1928 form, “The Front Page” isn’t just dark comedy. It’s disturbing to watch, this portrait of the newspaper game as the fiefdom of crass, unprincipled reporters and editors, good old boys as cynical and perverse as the corrupt politicians they covered. Viewed through that clear cultural lens, TimeLine Theatre’s tumultuous,

Review: “Heartbreak House,” by G.B. Shaw Writers’ Theatre, Chicago German planes rumble in the night sky over Sussex, England, and as their bombs detonate ever closer to the residence of Capt. Shotover, one of his several guests takes decisive action. He runs from room to room turning on all the lights to make a brighter, clearer target for the airborne raiders. Is this fellow mad? Does he wish to die? The answer to the first question is, probably not; and to the

Review: “The Madness of George III,” by Alan Bennett Chicago Shakespeare Theatre The magic of Alan Bennett’s engrossing and substantial play “The Madness of George III” depends on a king who can rule the stage in every state of mind. This production boasts a monarch, played by Harry Groener, who commands the heart utterly, whether in coiffed authority or careening about in soiled undergarments, his dignity in tatters and his reign in peril. And yet

On Friday April 22, I attended "the first period production of Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito in North America." It was presented by Toronto’s Opera Atelier, and it was excellent. (You can read my review, for Toronto’s Globe and Mail newspaper, here.) Do you know the company? Opera Atelier has been around for 25 years, presenting historically informed productions of operas from Monteverdi to Mozart. This makes them one of the first – and still one of the few – opera companies in the

Review: “Orlando,” adapted from Virginia Woolf by Sarah Ruhl Court Theatre, Chicago What a thorny and enigmatic subject is the life-long process that leads toward human understanding and indeed self-knowledge. In her fanciful and yet serious fictional-biography “Orlando,” Virginia Woolf suggested that meandering pathway of discovery, of comprehending the world wholly, through the eyes of a woman as well as a man, might require a good deal more than  a

Last night (March 17), I counted myself fortunate to be among the 100-or-so people who attended Christina Petrowska-Quilico’s piano recital at Toronto’s Glenn Gould Studio. Petrowska-Quilico is a fixture on Toronto’s new-music scene, who has played works by many Canadian composers over the years. But the composer she’s most closely connected with is a relatively obscure figure (even by Canadian standards): Ann Southam, who passed away last year at the age of 73. Petrowska-Quilico’s all-Southam recital was,

  In late January I was invited to a concert at Bargemusic, Olga Bloom's delightful floating concert hall anchored on the Brooklyn side of the East River. Mirror Visions Ensemble performed two recent song cycles, Russell Platt's From Noon to Starry Night: A Walt Whitman Cantata and Tom Cipullo's A Visit with Emily. The trek out to Brooklyn yielded many rewards, not the least of which was the enchanting venue, but I also found myself revisiting a vague question raised in the first

Review: “Hercules,” by G.F. Handel Lyric Opera of Chicago If the essence of a classic artwork is timelessness, the Lyric Opera makes the case for Handel’s “Hercules” by ripping it from costumed antiquity and giving it modern context and fresh urgency. The opera’s luxurious but stylistically challenging music, reflecting the agony of souls bruised by the devastation of war, is imbued with brilliance and depth by a cast of singers who indeed

It all began almost 50 years ago, when Joseph Shabalala had a dream – literally. In his sleep, the young South African farm hand and factory worker imagined a new a-cappella male vocal ensemble. Soon the group was a reality, and chose a name: "Ladysmith" was the town the singers came from, "Black" was a reference to black oxen, and "Mambazo" is Zulu for axe. Today, Shabalala still leads Ladysmith Black Mambazo – and from the stage of Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall on February 25, he proudly

I recently wrote something for the Houston Chronicle about Amy Chua's views on the value of classical music. She's the author whose memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother has been, to say the least, controversial. You can read my article here. She seems to view classical music as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. It’s for instilling discipline and a perfectionist mindset. It’s for the cultivation of a competitive spirit. It’s for achieving social status. The music itself

I saw Nixon in China last week (not the Met’s production, but the Canadian Opera Company’s impressive presentation, which is currently on stage in Toronto), and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. It’s the kind of piece that stays with you for a while. One thing that strikes me about this opera is that it puts the music first. Adams’ musical style (love it or hate it) is so strong, confident and in-your-face, that Nixon feels like an opera, not a play set to music. In this way, it

Review: “Sex With Strangers,” by Laura Eason Steppenwolf Theatre, Chicago “Sex With Strangers” has a good deal to do with sex, or at least talk about sex, but a good deal more to do with other enthusiasms like money, fame, manipulation and control. Sally Murphy and Stephen Louis Grush give smart, edgy, laugh-out-loud performances in playwright Laura Eason’s two-hander about a pair of writers whose wildly different paths just happen to lead to the same