Post-inauguration Saturday wasn't the easiest time to be in New York City. Whatever side you were on politically, the streets in much of mid-town were closed off. Police were everywhere. Cars seemed not to know where to go or what to do. I even saw a cab driving with its passenger door yawning open. The one way across 42nd Street was the Park Avenue overpass; looking down … [Read more...] about Days of tension, anger and (thank God) New York Polyphony

LONDON - The guy behind the ticket counter at the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre checked out my Brooklyn zip code and asked "Did you come over for this?"  "It was in the top three reasons." He wasn't surprised. People had been coming to the theater over the past week from as far away as Australia to see 4:48 Psychosis, probably never having never heard of the composer, … [Read more...] about The devastating debut of 4:48 Psychosis (the opera) stands high in 2016’s best

With each 9/11 anniversary, I still don't know how to process the experience. Of course, I was glad on Sunday's 15th anniversary of 9/11 that the new World Trade Center is up and in what has become one of the most vibrant, architecturally advanced sections of Manhattan. I was happy about my photographic accident to the left, which had the emblematic twin columns of … [Read more...] about Michael Hersch, 9/11, and the twin towers of light

Pulitzer-winning composer David Lang has written several operas so far, none of them in the least bit conventional, and all of them showing how much the ultra-minimalist Bang on a Can aesthetic can be fascinatingly at odds with an art form that's traditionally grand. His latest is The Loser, which was unveiled Wednesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Opera House in a … [Read more...] about David Lang’s new opera The Loser may yet win

The world probably wouldn't be appreciably different had Bach's Brandenburg Concertos not been discovered sitting on some shelf, possibly unplayed and unexamined, a century or so after they were finished in 1721. J.S. Bach still would've been re-discovered. His works would be as venerated as they are now. But the Brandenburg Concertos are so singular in Bach's output, in the … [Read more...] about Bach’s Brandenburgs: Liberated by the Sebastians?