Getting to Know Beverly Sills
Commemorating a cultural figure like Beverly Sills (1929–2007), who died last week of lung cancer at 78, is not easy. After a much-publicized career as a coloratura soprano, Sills served as general...
View ArticleJerry Hadley, R.I.P.
cross-posted at About Last Night Jerry Hadley’s suicide has set the small town that is American opera to buzzing. It was a surprise—I can’t think of another well-known classical singer who has killed...
View ArticleWhy We Remember Jerry Hadley
My fellow blogger Terry Teachout has already posted an apt expression of poignant regret at the news of the suicide of the American tenor Jerry Hadley, who shot himself at age 55. A career in music can...
View ArticleAn Interview with Jack O’Brien
Today, contentions presents an interview with theater director Jack O’Brien. Mr. O’Brien won the Tony Award this year for Best Director for his work on Tom Stoppard’s critically acclaimed play The...
View ArticleEnjoyable Brit Moderns
Readers of this blog have repeatedly expressed distress at the way classical music is going. Indeed, in February, the Metropolitan Opera announced that it has commissioned two new works from the...
View ArticleRafael Kubelík
A splendid DVD from Deutsche Grammophon, Rafael Kubelík: A Portrait, reminds us that multiple tyrannies can govern a conductor’s life. Kubelík (1914 –1996) was a mightily gifted Bohemian-born...
View ArticleThe Problem With the Klinghoffer Opera
In an attempt to split the difference with its critics, the Metropolitan Opera announced today that it would go ahead with its plans to put on a production of John Adams’ opera The Death of Klinghoffer...
View ArticleKeeping an Open Mind About Murder
The decision of the Metropolitan Opera to continue with its plan to produce The Death Of Klinghoffer but to cancel the simulcast of the piece to theaters around the world has pleased no one. Critics of...
View ArticleThe ‘Klinghoffer’ Opera and the Mainstreaming of Jew Hatred
The Metropolitan Opera celebrates its annual opening night on Monday but most of the discussion about the 2014-15 season centers on a performance that won’t happen for another month. The debut of its...
View ArticleWill the Met Opera Silence the Jews?
Over the course of the last century, whenever Jews rose up to protest anti-Semitism, they were invariably told that they were doing more harm than good. Whether it was in pre-Holocaust Europe or even...
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