Opera Review: A Show About Nothing

The Whisper Opera returns (quietly) to New York.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Ross Karre hugs a bass drum in a performance of David Lang's The Whisper Opera.
Photo courtesy International Contemporary Ensemble.

For almost five hundred years, humanity has used the form of opera to express itself. And for most of those centuries the argument has always run: which is more important--the words, or the music? (There's even a couple of operas about that very subject. However, in The Whisper Opera, which premiered in 2013 at Mostly Mozart, and returns this week for a run of performances at the Skirball Center at NYU, the composer David Lang provides his own answer. Mr. Lang, who is one of the founders of Bang On A Can chooses "neither."

Opera Review: Into Her Hypercube

Prototype premieres Mikael Karlsson's The Echo Drift.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

A clockwork redhead: Blythe Gaissertt as Walker Loats in The Echo Drift.
Photo by Olga Baranova © 2018 PROTOYPE Festival.

The set was simple: a spartan bed, a stool and a small desk, a cube-shaped prison cell on struts, trapped inside a larger cube that had a projection screen on one side serving as a wall. This assemblage was constructed on a swivel. It and the cyclorama at the back of the stage were the projected surface for minimal scenery rendered in stark white chalk lines. (The set was by co-librettist Elle Kunnos de Voss (credited as "Environment Designer") and the projections were by Simon Harding.)

Superconductor 2016 Summer Festival Preview: Mostly Mozart

For its 50th birthday, Lincoln Center pulls out all the stops.

by Paul J. Pelkonen

Before Mostly Mozart came into existence half a century ago, the idea of staying in the city in its hottest months to listen to classical music performances was practically nonexistent. Birthed in the airy confines of what was then Philharmonic Hall at the newly constructed Lincoln Center, the Mostly Mozart Festivl rapidly grew into a cultural oasis for New Yorkers in the month of August. It remains today a celebration of all that is beautiful and good.

Opera Review: The Glory of Infinite Resources

The Park Avenue Armory stages Louis Andriessen's De Materie.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

A zeppelin watches its flock in Part IV of Louis Andriessen's De Materie.
Photo by Wonge Bergmann for the Park Avenue Armory © 2016 Park Avenue Armory.

The yawning black void of the Wade Thompson Drill Hall at the Park Avenue Armory is the largest theatrical space in the art music community of New York City. This week, that vast black slate is the playground of director Heiner Goebbels and the first North American stage production of De Materie, a sprawling two-hour work by the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen. Like some of the larger works by Hector Berlioz, De Materie falls somewhere between enormous symphony and fully staged opera. This work is both staggering in its achievement and bewildering in scope, an expression of what can be achieved when a composer's imagination meets a director's enormous budget.

The Superconductor Summer Festival Preview Part II

The Lincoln Center Festival, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic and Mostly Mozart.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

In the summer months, Lincoln Center transforms into a bustling hub of social activity for music-loving New Yorkers. We break down the avant-garde offerings of the Lincoln Center Festival, New York Philharmonic's summer concerts, the Metropolitan Opera's summer screening program and the venerable Mostly Mozart Festival, transforming this Upper West Side plaza into a sort of Salzburg on the Hudson.