If you’ve ever parented, taught, or observed children aged seven, eight, or nine years old, you know that they need to be doing stuff to learn, not just sitting listening. This was something I observed when I went to see a professional/educational collaboration of Dido and Aeneas last spring at LaGuardia School of Music, Art, [...]

If you’re in a roomful of professional musicians and you want to watch the cumulative blood pressure level spike, just question the assumed wisdom that live music by professional musicians is preferable to canned music. The agita is understandable—these are people worrying about their livelihoods, after all—but the fact remains that despite the many technology [...]

When Gustavo Dudamel‘s in town, you go. So on Saturday night, I caught the opening concert of the Israel Philharmonic’s U.S. tour with Dudamel at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, just prior to his two Carnegie Hall concerts on November 16 and 17. I asked my 14-year-old daughter to come along, and [...]

It’s been pretty warm so far this fall, thankfully. But Inbal Pinto Dance Company’s  Shaker, at the Joyce, might put you in the mood for a cold snap with a winter wonderland of a set, based on the concept of a snowglobe. A thick layer of fake snow blankets the stage, and a horizontal baffle [...]

A few months ago, I blogged about then-incoming New York City Opera general manager Gérard Mortier, quoting from an interview he had recently given to French public radio to try to divine what was in store for opera lovers in NYC. Frankly I was excited about the prospect of Mortier taking over NYCO and potentially [...]

Attention spans are definitely getting shorter. The whole internet thing, Google, texting, Twitter – how much shorter can the essence of a thought get than 140 characters or an emoticon? And now brevity has ferociously seized the performing arts with 60×60 Dance. This free event, at the World Financial Center’s Arts>World on November 14 at [...]

According to some people (looking at you, Thomas Friedman), the world is flat. One of the reasons is that the Internet makes the planet feel much smaller, more accessible. News moves fast, creating a feeling of familiar ubiquity no matter where you are (and provided you have access to the necessary technology—a big caveat, I [...]

If you don’t mind navigating the rather nasty-looking Lincoln Center construction site, you can now get into the Juilliard School‘s newly renovated interior. It reopened within the last few weeks, looking very spiffy indeed, even if the outside street scene features the music of street drills and is overlooked by a giant crane. Of course, [...]

If you recall with cynicism some of the Guggenheim’s more commercial exhibitions over the last decade (such as The Art of the Motorcycle, Brazil: Body and Soul, and the Armani retrospective), you might feel redeemed by the current show, theanyspacewhatever (http://www.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/exhibition_pages/anyspace/index.html). Or you might feel a bit duped, depending on your persuasion and/or patience. Theanyspacewhatever [...]

The revival of Arthur Miller’s 1947 play All My Sons, currently on Broadway, has been dividing critics. Some praised director Simon McBurney‘s approach, which eschews the strict naturalism so beloved on the Great White Way in favor of a certain stylization, while others disliked the production for pretty much the same reason (though they tended [...]