Articles
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Page 333
Jonathan Franzen’s ‘The Kraus Project’
Why was Karl Kraus so angry? Well, you’d angry too if….uh….
Karl Kraus, the Austrian playwright, editor and social critic, was little known to today’s English-speaking audience— until now. Thanks to the novelist and Kraus scholar Jonathan Franzen, the angry old man of German satire lives anew.
Articles
3 minute read
Yannick leads Beethoven’s Ninth (2nd review)
Yannick leaps off a musical cliff
Yannick Nézet-Séguin is emerging as an artist of notable imagination and daring. In the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth he was maybe a little too daring.
Articles
3 minute read
The magic of ‘Singin’ in the Rain’
Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, and the way we were
For one night, Singing’ in the Rain transformed my ordinary childhood into something wonderful. It’s still performing the same function for my adulthood.
Articles
5 minute read
Yannick leads Beethoven’s Ninth (1st review)
In the quest for goose bumps, size matters
Yannick-Nézet Séguin’s version of Beethoven’s Ninth inadvertently demonstrated that the same work can be performed in radically different ways. He made the most of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s major asset: Its size.
Articles
4 minute read
Opera Philadelphia’s ‘Nabucco’ (2nd review)
The mightiest man on Earth? (and other flaws in Verdi’s Nabucco)
Nabucco’s characters lack depth, and the music is less accomplished than what Verdi would write just a few years later. So director/designer Thaddeus Strassberger was indeed clever to mount this Nabucco as it might have been performed in Italy in the 1840s.
Articles
4 minute read
Jane Austen's ‘Emma’ at the Lantern
Jane Austen’s 21st-Century problem
If you love Jane Austen, you’ll love the Lantern’s lovely adaptation of Emma. But if Austen’s novels were force-fed to you in high school, you might gag. In our age of instant gratification and short attention spans, therein lies a cultural challenge.
Articles
4 minute read
Opera Philadelphia’s ‘Nabucco’ (1st review)
Jehovah vs. Baal, then and now
Verdi’s dramatically clunky Nabucco was a broadly drawn metaphor for Austria’s domination of Italy. Thaddeus Strassberger constructs a play around a play in an effort to mask some of the drama’s weaknesses. Its virtues include a fiery new soprano and a final moment of genuine theatrical magic.
Articles
4 minute read
Kafka’s ‘The Castle’ at FringeArts Festival
A Kafka who’s not Kafkaesque
Unlike Kafka’s The Trial, the protagonist in The Castle is no victim. He’s an ambitious fellow who might even be a stand-in for Kafka, or even the messiah. Or both.
Articles
3 minute read
Philadelphia Orchestra’s Tchaikovsky opening
Back to the future with Yannick and Anne-Sophie
What have the Russians done for us lately? Well, Tchaikovsky is timeless, as the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter reminded us on opening night.
Articles
2 minute read
Orchestra 2001’s opening weekend (2nd review)
Young composer, astonishing head
Sometimes I dread poems set to music. But when it works, it’s art. Chris Rogerson's Fishing was one of three new works, each giving a prominent role to the keyboard.
Articles
5 minute read