The Latest on New York Arts

• A plus: The Boston Early Music Festival and the Commonwealth Lyric Theater present first operas by Handel and Rachmaninoff
  Here’s a weird coincidence. Two composers, nearly two centuries apart, almost polar opposites, were both 19 when their first operas were performed. Both operas are named after central characters whose three-syllable names begin with A. And both just received terrific Boston performances — simultaneously, in different parts of town. There the coincidence ends […]
• Wozzeck at the ENO; Othello at the National Theatre
  A recent visit to London offered interestingly comparable back-to-back performances: Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck at the English National Opera, London Coliseum, Saturday evening, May 25th; and the next afternoon Shakespeare’s Othello at the National Theatre. Both works center on a military man, mad from the start or driven mad as things progress, who comes to […]
• Adaptation of Chekhov’s Seagull Lays Golden Egg for Woolly Mammoth in DC
  This is a bit of a sacrilege, but I have always found Anton Chekhov’s much beloved nineteenth-century play, The Seagull, bordering on a parody of itself. When Masha, the estate manager’s daughter, enters in the opening scene of the play dressed all in black and announces she “is in mourning for her life…” how can we possibly keep a straight face? Chekhov cou […]
• The Rite of Spring: The Untold Story
  Just in time for the celebrations marking the centenary of the first performance of The Rite of Spring, in Paris on May 29, 1913, a cylinder recording has turned up in a storeroom at the Hotel du Prince in Geneva. Probably unplayed for a century, it preserves with astonishing clarity a discussion involving the scenarist NICOLAS ROERICH, the impresario SERGE […]
• Marek Janowski Conducts the San Francisco Symphony in Schumann’s Manfred Overture, Rhenish Symphony and the Brahms Double Concerto with Steinbacher and Gerhardt
  It has been about a hundred years now since classical composers automatically turned to literature for inspiration. Walt Whitman was perhaps the last universal philosopher of the written word to appeal widely to musicians. Expansive, idealistic compositions by Vaughan Williams (A Sea Symphony), Delius (Sea Drift), Hindemith ("When Lilacs last in the Doo […]