Capital New York

Marilyn Horne, who ruled American opera in the 1970s, trains a new generation for a very different art

She worries about the emphasis on singers’ appearance in the era of HD broadcasts. One summer Horne herself lost 50 pounds—the right way, with good eating and exercise—and she is convinced her middle register promptly went flat and her voice got a size smaller.

But she recognizes that singers now have to be thin, or at least thinnish, to be hired; and that not all singers who are overweight can slim down and keep their voices beautiful. She is preparing singers for careers, and she is a realist.

“We do take people who are overweight,” she said of the academy. “But I have to warn them, and ask them, ‘How badly do you really want this?’" More

Posted on October 31st, 2011 10:34am

Model citizen: Composer Eric Whitacre, dashing star of high-school choruses worldwide, makes the big bucks

His hair—shoulder-length, dyed blond, and carefully styled, giving the effect of a buttoned-up former surfer dude—takes up its own substantial part of his thoughts.

“My hair has become this thing we joke about sometimes, that it has a career of its own," he said. "Some days I’m just sick of it. I just want to cut it short, and now I actually have to have meetings about this shit with my manager and publisher and the modeling people about, like, should I cut my hair?”

You have very possibly never seen Whitacre’s flowing locks, nor heard his music, but he is famous. His “profile among choral enthusiasts amounts to a rock star’s adulation,” wrote Steve Smith in the Times last year. “To call Mr. Whitacre a phenomenon is to sell his rapid ascent short.” His lush and emotional music pushes the envelope of harmony and rhythm just enough to stand out in the insular world of high-school and college choirs and concert bands, where Whitacre’s work is simply inescapable. More

Posted on April 13th, 2011 10:39am

At the Armory, a massive display of quilts puts a multiplier on discomfort

The disorientation is as effective as Emerson’s at the beginning of “Experience”: “Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight.” Except instead of stairs, there are quilts. More

Posted on March 30th, 2011 8:57am

Daniel Harding, international star conductor, struggles with the American adjustment

What the celebrated 35-year-old British conductor who made his debut with the New York Philharmonic in two performances on Thursday and Saturday night, has found are extremely efficient orchestras, with very impersonal relationships with their conductors. It takes an American orchestra a while to figure out they're allowed to laugh at his jokes. More

Posted on March 7th, 2011 6:29am

Zubin Mehta takes the Israel Philharmonic to town

"We have never felt comfortable," Mehta said. "The recession hasn't touched us because even before the recession we had no money. The government gives us about eight percent of our budget and doesn't give any tax deductibility to individual donors, so we rely on box office and the rest we go around the world begging for." More

Posted on March 2nd, 2011 8:57am

Afterlife of a diva: Renata Scotto on aging, talent, tradition and why she quit

On the walls of her office, there are more photos of the productions she’s directed than of her. There's a Tosca starring Deborah Voigt, a Lucia with a bloody wedding dress; in her memoir, she railed against the tradition of bloodying the dress, saying that the blood was in the music, but, she said with a smile, "I changed my mind." More

Posted on February 21st, 2011 8:34am

Shhh! Alloy Orchestra rankles silent-film purists with its live scores

"It’s one of those things that’s oddly contentious," Ken Winokur said with a slightly weary laugh. Winokur is one of the three members of Alloy Orchestra, a three-man ensemble that has devoted itself to developing and performing new scores for the films of the silent era, and he is therefore a defender of the necessity of the music.

"These films were always intended to be performed with a score," he said by phone from his home in Cambridge. "The timing of silent films depended on there being another source of information and entertainment that’s going on simultaneous to the image. Without that going on in the background, the films are only half there, and I think they’re really dull. I really don’t like watching the films with no score." More

Posted on February 2nd, 2011 9:15am

Ask Edna: Classical music's great power broker shows a soft side for young musicians

The column is something like if Bill Gates started dispensing advice to young computer engineers. Landau is one of the great legends of the classical music industry—a nurturing presence, fiercely loyal to her artists (including Itzhak Perlman, Evgeny Kissin, Joshua Bell, and Hilary Hahn), who helped preside over the growth of a small firm into one of the largest and most powerful management companies in the world. In 2006, a year before she retired from IMG, New York featured her in their “Influentials” issue, calling her the "intensely coveted, hugely devoted grand dame of New York concert managers, who inspires a rare level of trust and commitment from her clients and has unparalleled star-making and talent-spotting powers." More

Posted on January 28th, 2011 10:56am

All that spazz: A night out with Cole Escola, a microcelebrity born too late

In the early hours of Jan. 18, and Cole Escola was in his Superman underwear. He hadn’t made a point of wearing them, but he was almost out of clean briefs and these—bright blue with red tipping and a big “S” on the crotch—were his last pair. More

Posted on January 25th, 2011 9:54am

'Indie classical' goes uptown: Judd Greenstein on new music

Theirs is the first generation for whom it’s natural, rather than transgressive, to make music that could be classified as both “pop” and “classical,” whose albums are reviewed by both Gramophone and Pitchfork. The members of this scene—which in New York has often been called (since there has to be a name) “indie classical” or “postclassical”—has started record labels (Greenstein co-founded New Amsterdam Records, one of the most prominent), gotten fans and good reviews, and produced memorable concerts at downtown and Brooklyn venues like (Le) Poisson Rouge and Issue Project Room.

What they’ve lacked is a dependable uptown home, until now. More

Posted on January 17th, 2011 10:18am