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2 weeks 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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2 weeks 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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3 weeks 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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4 weeks 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.
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1 month ago | 
classicalvoiceamerica.org | David Patrick Stearns
NEW YORK — Recklessly ambitious, bewilderingly epic, the Kurt Weill/Alan Jay Lerner musical Love Life has been forgotten, lost, and periodically resurrected as visionary theater. But is it good? Sometimes. In the midst of rehearsal in March 2020 when the pandemic hit and canceled it, the New York City Center Encores! production of Love Life finally opened March 26 (for seven performances through March 30) to a packed house that was ready to forgive the show’s weaknesses.
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1 month ago | 
classicalvoiceamerica.org | David Patrick Stearns
PERSPECTIVE — Pianist András Schiff began the velvet revolution in Bach pianism in the early 1980s, establishing an emotionally generous alternative to the analytical Glenn Gould, earning the admiration of Daniel Barneboim, and giving a place at the table for like-minded pianists such as Angela Hewitt. His repertoire has expanded toward Bartók, his choice of instruments now includes clavichord, and his concerts often have him conducting from the keyboard.
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1 month ago | 
classicalvoiceamerica.org | David Patrick Stearns
NEW YORK — Courage and fortitude aren’t typical listening requirements spelled out in pre-performance talks, but at the Darkness Sounding festival March 21 and 22 at the 92NY, the Wild Up ensemble warranted a fair warning. East Coast modern-music groups hold no edge on Christopher Rountree’s musician collective, founded in 2010 in Los Angeles, and returning after its Julius Eastman festival here burned a hole in the brains of those who heard it two years ago.
