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1 week ago | 
airmail.news | Matthew Gurewitsch
The pianist Hunter Noack, 36, is taking the road less traveled by, and that makes all the difference. As the founder and star attraction of “In a Landscape: Classical Music in the Wild,” inaugurated in 2016, Noack will be concertizing from May to September in Pacific Northwest and West Coast wildernesses, where weather can whiplash in a heartbeat. Fortunately, as a native Oregonian, he’s an outdoorsman for all seasons.
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2 weeks ago | 
airmail.news | Matthew Gurewitsch
Who lives, who dies, who tells your story? In 1942, the insurance executive Emil Freund of Prague perished miserably in the Polish ghetto of Łódź, sent there to die by the Nazis. Jump cut to 2001, when an unsuspecting Viet Nam vet named Gerald McDonald, living in Lyons, Illinois, and raised Lutheran, learns that he is the rightful heir to the modern art collection of a Jewish great-great-uncle.
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2 weeks ago | 
airmail.news | Matthew Gurewitsch
In Richard Strauss’s 90-minute opera, Salome bursts onstage straight from the pages of Psychopathia Sexualis, causes no end of mischief, and goes out in necrophiliac ecstasies over the severed head of John the Baptist. It’s a killer role, but as Elza van den Heever established two seasons ago in a brutalist production by Lydia Steier for the Paris Opéra, neither the music nor the drama holds any terrors for her.
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1 month ago | 
airmail.news | Matthew Gurewitsch
All things considered, England’s songwriter, singer, playwright, actor, and director Noël Coward had every reason to purr at the reception of his feather-light backstage comedy Present Laughter. The 1942 premiere, which Coward starred in as well as directed, proved boffo box office, and no wonder. As the 40-year-old matinee idol Garry Essendine—anagram of “neediness”—he was more or less playing himself.
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2 months ago | 
airmail.news | Matthew Gurewitsch
“Hi-Yo, Silver! For generations of juvenile TV fans since 1949, the “William Tell Overture” was synonymous with The Lone Ranger, all 221 episodes of it. In fact, the series’ hard-charging theme music—officially “The March of the Swiss Soldiers”—is just the finale of Gioachino Rossini’s four-movement pops classic.
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2 months ago | 
airmail.news | Matthew Gurewitsch
In 1961, when Grace Bumbry broke the color barrier at the Bayreuth Festival, the German tabloids went wild for “die schwarze Venus,” or Black Venus, and papers around the world followed suit. The reportedly shy 24-year-old American had been cast in Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser as the pagan love goddess of olden times, partying up a storm underground in defiance of killjoy medieval Christianity. The old guard howled, but Wagner’s grandsons Wieland and Wolfgang stuck to their longswords.
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2 months ago | 
airmail.news | Matthew Gurewitsch
Last All Saints’ Day—November 1, if that one’s not on your calendar—the petite, spiky, 30-something Beijing native Yuja Wang tiptoed onstage at the renowned Berliner Philharmonie in a bareback sequined microdress and you-tell-me-how-many-inch stilettos. Alongside her, almost a shadow, walked Víkingur Ólafsson of Reykjavík, 40, lankily owlish in suit and tie. The Odd Couple superstars of classical piano were pooling talents in a program anchored by Schubert’s goblin-haunted Fantasy in F minor, D.
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Feb 7, 2025 | 
airmail.news | Matthew Gurewitsch
Picture a composer writing a sonata or a symphony, and what do you see? Someone at a desk or a keyboard, scribbling in a frenzy or absently chewing a pen? Anna Clyne, a 44-year-old London native transplanted to New Paltz, in New York’s Hudson Valley, does it her way. Inspiration comes at her over multiple channels, and dictation from the Muse seems not to be one of them. Instead, she re-invents her process project by project.
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Jan 31, 2025 | 
airmail.news | Matthew Gurewitsch
In an age preoccupied with identity politics, the actor Andrew Scott has a rival issue on his mind. “I think transformation is as important as representation,” Scott told The Guardian in September 2023, ahead of a month’s run of the one-man Vanya in London’s West End, where it was captured live on video. A limited Off Broadway transfer opens on March 11. It’s Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, transposed to present-day Ireland.
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Jan 10, 2025 | 
airmail.news | Matthew Gurewitsch
The king’s a bawcock, and a heart of gold,A lad of life, an imp of fame;Of parents good, of fist most valiant. I kiss his dirty shoe. Of all Shakespeare’s warrior royals, none sets English hearts beating more proudly than Henry V, who, though vastly outnumbered, routed the French at Agincourt on October 25, 1415. Six hundred years later to the day, the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon commemorated the victory with Gregory Doran’s production of the play that bears Henry’s name.
