Joel Lobenthal

Bio: Joel Lobenthal writes on ballet and opera. More of his work can be found here.

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After the harvest: on a stretch of Route 22, farmers find ways to adapt to a post-dairy economy

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“There are farms and then there are farms,” 74-year-old Julie Schroeder, owner of Silamar Farm, which she and her late husband purchased in 1964, told me. She is a spry and spirited holdout, proud to be able to keep going without the outside investment that has become a mainstay in farming. In 1964, she and her late husband Harry paid $52,000 for the entire property, originally two farms that had been cultivated for a century. When the Schroeders moved in, Northeast was dense with dairy farms. Schroeder estimates that when she moved here there were 40 dairy farms in the town. But this far south the dairy business is a matter of going-going-nearly-gone. Today there are four left in Northeast. More

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By Joel Lobenthal

on November 30th, 2012 2:45pm

 
Article

Barking when needed: seeing and hearing three of today's most remarkable operatic voices

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Tenor Rolando Villazón sang with the Philadelphia Orchestra in Verdi’s Requiem on Oct. 23 at Carnegie Hall. Baritones Simon Keenlyside and Gerald Finley are starring, respectively, in the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Thomas Adès’s The Tempest and Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro. Each of the three is his own man, but Villazón is a stark contrast to the two baritones.  More

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By Joel Lobenthal

on November 8th, 2012 11:20am

 
Article

Fluently Baryshnikov: the dancer visits the ghosts of his past with 'In Paris'


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Since his defection from the USSR in 1974, Baryshnikov’s career in the West has been largely an attempt to plumb possibilities unknown in the Soviet Union at the time he left (and he’s continued in that direction even since 1989). In much the same way that his Western career has often been a rebuke to his past, he’s been diffident until now about accessing his Russian experience. Now, the very fact that he speaks entirely in Russian and French in this theater piece must inevitably function as an act of reconciliation. More

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By Joel Lobenthal

on August 3rd, 2012 5:12pm

 
Article

A MoMA presentation of films from early Soviet studio Mezhrabprom saves the best, 'Miss Mend,' for almost-last

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The young and impoverished Soviet state was relaxing its proscriptions on private enterprise and looking for foreign investment. German Communist Willi Münzenberg and Russian entrepreneur Moisei Alenikov struck up a partnership. They saw an opportunity in the drop in Soviet film production, and began importing great films from the peak of German Expressionism into the USSR. But then, with the establishment of Mezhrabprom's Moscow plant, came the unspooling of authentic Soviet product that would go on to establish an international presence and influence. More

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By Joel Lobenthal

on April 23rd, 2012 3:43pm

 
Article

The Noël Coward beat: At Lincoln Center library, his public lives come to life

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At Lincoln Center’s Library for the Performing Arts, the vagaries of time, of shifting critical reputation, the many hues of theatrical “truth,” all hover around Star Quality, the Library’s new Noël Coward exhibition. Coward’s singular theatrical world—acerbic, irreverent, and yet gossamer—is brought memorably to life. More

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By Joel Lobenthal

on March 23rd, 2012 11:41am

 
Article

Heat and light: Maria Callas takes the stage again, on film, at Lincoln Center

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What made Maria Callas’ voice so unusual? “Maybe it’s the heat I put into it,” Callas herself suggests in a 1969 interview for French television that will be screened at Alice Tully Hall this weekend as part of the “Callas on Film” series. That heat was scorching; her voice had extraordinary size, power, agility, and variety of color. But inseparable from the sound were the many public and theatrical Callas personas that live on in video and audio recordings of performances and interviews, and countless books, and which continue to galvanize old fans and newcomers alike. More

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By Joel Lobenthal

on March 16th, 2012 9:33am

 
Article

At the Met, a dazzling revival of Mussorgsky's 'Khovanshchina' that is Russian to the core

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You can’t help but love Modest Mussorgsky; not only was he a brilliant composer, he was such a total, Dostoyevskian mess. This month, his great opera Khovanshchina is being performed by the Met after a 13-year absence. More

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By Joel Lobenthal

on March 9th, 2012 12:24pm

 
Article

Muse of many faces: Ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq's life and times, before and after Balanchine, remembered (and, now, novelized)

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On stage, New York City Ballet star Tanaquil Le Clercq could embody every archetype of woman she was called on to portray, and so could be every type of ballerina. Her unique style and sensibility were due in part to the unlikely marriage of her father Jacques, a French academic, and her mother Edith, a former debutante from St. Louis. It reflected, too, the way she was molded by, and had inspired the world’s great choreographers, above all George Balanchine, NYCB’s founder and artistic director. More

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By Joel Lobenthal

on February 29th, 2012 3:11pm