Jeffrey Arlo Brown

1 week ago | flipboard.com | Jeffrey Arlo Brown

Adventures at the edge of music: ranking the King Crimson albums | Classical MusicFew bands have reshaped the boundaries of rock music as radically—and as relentlessly—as King Crimson. Emerging in 1969 with In the Court of the …

3 weeks ago | van-magazine.com | Jeffrey Arlo Brown

Few prominent classical musicians—and few prominent Germans—have spoken out about Israel’s brutal war in Palestine quite as consistently, as passionately, and with as much attention to detail as the violinist (and son of Daniel) Michael Barenboim. When I met him last month in a quiet corner of a beer garden near the Barenboim-Said Akademie in Berlin, where he is a professor of violin and chamber music, he discussed the conflict with precise conviction.

1 month ago | van-magazine.com | Hugh Morris |Jeffrey Arlo Brown

On Sunday, a new “Don Giovanni,” the final staging of Kirill Serebrennikov’s Mozart-Da Ponte trilogy, premiered at the Komische Oper in Berlin. It imagined the title character as being taken through the bardo throughout the opera, following the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and substituted movements from Mozart’s Requiem for the work’s usual finale. After the four-hour performance, VAN editors Hugh Morris and Jeffrey Arlo Brown convened for white wine in Kreuzberg to discuss the production.

2 months ago | van-magazine.com | Jeffrey Arlo Brown

In March, pianist András Schiff announced that he would withdraw from all his concerts in the United States for the 2025–2026 season, citing “recent and unprecedented political changes.” He has a good eye for the danger of such developments: His native Hungary, where he hasn’t set foot for over a decade, is an oft-cited roadmap for the MAGA movement’s authoritarian tactics. I met Schiff last week in Berlin to discuss this decision. To continue reading, subscribe now.

2 months ago | van-magazine.com | Jeffrey Arlo Brown |Hugh Morris

In May 2020, when George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis, many American classical music institutions joined what appeared to be a society-wide reckoning on racism. The Minnesota Orchestra commissioned a work in Floyd’s memory, by composer Carlos Simon and librettist Marc Bamuthi, called “brea(d)th.” The Chicago Symphony Orchestra shared sobering statistics on representation of Black and Latino musicians in orchestras.