At a concert this winter, I ran into a friend, a practicing lawyer who also holds a degree in music. She admits she is baffled by classical music reviews and wanted to know, “What is the point of music criticism, anyway?” Um … what is the POINT? I was aghast. As someone who devours music [...]

This past week, the two most potent cultural events I’ve seen involve both space travel and music—Wooster Group’s La Didone, and SciFi Network’s Battlestar Galactica. Coincidence? La Didone intertwines tellings of Francesco Cavalli’s opera and Mario Bava’s film, Terrore nello spazio (Planet of the Vampires, 1965). Wooster Group regulars, including Kate Valk, Ari Fliakos, and [...]

These days, when you hear news reports about the daunting challenges facing the arts and culture world, it’s typically problems of the financial sort being discussed. For the Syrian clarinetist Kinan Azmeh, who plays Middle Eastern music with his Kinan Azmeh Quartet tonight at St. Peter’s Church, it’s just one of many challenges he faces. [...]

Mark Morris has proven how deft he is with opera, particularly when it includes his wonderful dancers. His productions of Romeo & Juliet: On Motifs of Shakespeare, Orfeo ed Euridice, Platée, King Arthur—and the sublime L’Allegro ed il Penseroso ed il Moderato and Dido and Aeneas for his own company—all integrated his astute sensitivity with [...]

Earlier this December, I took the number 1 subway up to 125th Street to catch a daytime performance by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s at the Apollo Theater http://www.apollotheater.org/ for schoolchildren. The program, “What is American Music? NYC: The Great Migration and Ellis Island,” focused on twentieth-century migration to the United states, through the music [...]

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 [...]

I’ve been watching the San Francisco Symphony’s Carnegie Hall opening-night celebration of Leonard Bernstein’s 90th birthday year on Great Performances. Fittingly, there’s a little bit of everything Lenny here, early and late, Broadway, symphonic, dance, opera, song cycle—symphonic dances from West Side Story, “What a Movie” from Trouble in Tahiti (with Dawn Upshaw), “I Can [...]

In the ongoing babe-ification of the Western world, welcome to this week’s episode: Classical Babes 2.0. I’m referring, of course, to “Too Hot to Handel,” a current feature on the online arts and entertainment segment of Playboy. Sexing up classical music certainly isn’t anything new. I can remember a Beethoven LP cover from the 1970s [...]