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6 days ago | 
inquirer.com | David Patrick Stearns
Wagner’s five-hour Tristan und Isolde — returning to the Philadelphia Orchestra for the first time since 1934 — is something that great musicians long to live up to and hold for conditions to be as right as they can be. Leonard Bernstein, Carlos Kleiber, and Jessye Norman all held out for extraordinary circumstances that didn’t always turn out well.
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1 week ago | 
classicalvoiceamerica.org | David Patrick Stearns
NEW YORK — Philip Glass, 88, is best performed by those who haven’t known a world without him. One of them is Gustavo Dudamel, who conducted Glass’ Symphony No. 11 on May 22 with the New York Philharmonic, soon to be his, at David Geffen Hall. Four more of them comprise Brooklyn Rider, which played Glass’ complete string quartets over three concerts at the unlikely venue of The Cloisters, the first installment of which was May 21.
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2 weeks ago | 
inquirer.com | David Patrick Stearns
‘Tis the season of the 9th symphonies. It’s occuring at all levels of the classical music world. The Berlin Philharmonic is winding up its spring with Mahler’s Symphony No. 9. Early music groups that don’t venture much beyond Bach, stretch themselves with the Schubert Symphony No. 9. Philadelphia Orchestra has — at least this season — the Beethoven Symphony No. 9, intriguingly programmed with Florence Price, whose music appeared a century later and an ocean apart. Why not?
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1 month ago | 
classicalvoiceamerica.org | David Patrick Stearns
NEW YORK — What drove Salome to such extremes of revenge? Even as a tale from antiquity, the spurned princess who demands the head of St. John the Baptist on a silver tray is puzzlingly horrific. The new Metropolitan Opera production by Claus Guth of Richard Strauss’ opera, Salome, that opened April 29 generated answers in an edge-of-the-seat Dance of the Seven Veils, Salome’s currency to manipulate King Herod.
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1 month ago | 
inquirer.com | David Patrick Stearns
Any operagoer who claims to have witnessed an ideal Don Giovanni production is most likely mistaken. Mozart’s greatest opera is an elusive blend of morality tale and bedroom comedy, sometimes overwritten and sometimes underwritten, with the addition of mercilessly exposed high notes. It all requires miracles not common in opera, especially when the production at hand was created on relatively short notice.
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1 month ago | 
inquirer.com | David Patrick Stearns
Everything was all set. Twice. And then? Jennifer Higdon’s second opera — Woman With Eyes Closed — was commissioned, completed ahead of deadline, cast and workshopped when the 2020 lockdown canceled Opera Philadelphia’s premiere. The highly unusual premise — about a notorious, real-life 2012 art heist in Rotterdam — was dropped again when the ailing company’s 2024 fall festival was put on hold.
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1 month ago | 
classicalvoiceamerica.org | David Patrick Stearns
PERSPECTIVE — Playing all 15 of Dmitri Shostakovich’s string quartets over five concerts is the Jerusalem Quartet’s trademark. This season, the highlight of the ensemble’s national tour is a complete Shostakovich cycle played in chronological order, presented at the Cleveland Museum of Art by the Cleveland Chamber Music Society April 21-30 to conclude its 75th anniversary season. But this will not be the early-middle-late journey typical of Beethoven.
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1 month ago | 
mahoningmatters.com | David Patrick Stearns
Great ideas gone astray immediately tipped off the Friday opening night audience for Curtis Opera Theatre's Candide to expect a showbiz romp with some twists, rather than satirical social commentary that could give the show renewed bite. That's a dichotomy that encapsulates the show's history - it has more versions than Boris Godunov - since it first rose from the repressive chill of 1950s McCarthyism.
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1 month ago | 
inquirer.com | David Patrick Stearns
Great ideas gone astray immediately tipped off the Friday opening night audience for Curtis Opera Theatre’s Candide to expect a showbiz romp with some twists, rather than satirical social commentary that could give the show renewed bite. That’s a dichotomy that encapsulates the show’s history — it has more versions than Boris Godunov — since it first rose from the repressive chill of 1950s McCarthyism.
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1 month ago | 
inquirer.com | David Patrick Stearns
Tragedy isn’t always autobiographical. Proof of that is Mahler’s Symphony No. 6, which temperamentally lives up to its subtitle “Tragic,” but was written during a rather happy period in the composer’s life. And at the Friday Philadelphia Orchestra performance in Marian Anderson Hall, the symphony’s four boulder-like movements had tragedy co-excoexisting every other extreme emotion, cheek by jowl, sometimes simultaneously, under music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin.
