MUSIC
CRITICISM
I have been writing reviews of concerts and operas as a freelance music critic for more than a decade. I started by being a regular contributing writer for Dominic McHugh's website www.musicalcriticism.com (now sadly disactivated) which was a beacon of UK and US online music criticism in the 2010s. I also wrote for Listen Music Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and the online periodical Sound Stage Screen. I love the work of a music critic, and think it is often unfairly maligned. Criticism makes music matter--meaning it makes it important (and therefore accountable to critique and praise) and also "material," less ethereal and fugitive, easier to hold and behold and touch, to share through words.
A review essay of the recent and controversial production of Donizetti's Diluvio Universale in Bergamo
How the sounds of ‘Succession’ shred
the grandeur and respect the characters
so desperately try to project
The Conversation, 31 May 2023.
HBO’s “Succession” delivered its grand finale on May 28, 2023 – the climax of four award-packed seasons of searing put-downs, nihilistic humor and desperate power plays.
The show tells the story of ailing media tycoon Logan Roy and his four horrid children who aim to inherit his empire. I loved it because it rendered despicable people in power as human – funny, pathetic, capable of deep feeling – without once trying to redeem them.
But as a music historian, I will miss the series’ use of music and sound the most.
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link to full review here.
George Crumb hears the heartbeat of America
Los Angeles Times, 14 November 2010
Despite having turned 81 less than three weeks ago, American composer George Crumb remains deeply absorbed in his craft. The native of Charleston, W.V., has been nestled in his suburban Philadelphia home for 45 years. Thanks to an Emeritus professorship at the University of Pennsylvania, he can afford to not compose on commission. “I have always been a slow writer,” he confesses.
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Slow he may be, but he is by no means uninspired. He composes every morning and rewards himself with a scotch and water — or two — in the late afternoon.
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Full text linked here.
Messiaen: La Fête des Belles Eaux, Feuillets Inédits; Ravel/ Ensemble d’Ondes de Montréal, et al ATMA
lassique ATMA 22621, 11 May 2009
for the website www.musicalcriticism.com (now disabled)
We think of lesser-known works by celebrated authors as unperformed, unloved manuscripts collecting dust in archives—the province of specialists. All the more so if the work scores for a now obsolete instruments or—even worse—several of them. Thus Messiaen’s haunting Fête des Belles Eaux has fallen by the wayside as a consequence—no doubt—of its scoring for six Ondes Martenot. Yet in the Paris of 1937, you could stroll out in the evening along the Seine and hear Messiaen’s now long forgotten Fête des Belles Eaux resonating all along the riverbank.
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Full text linked here!
London Proms 20 & 21: Stockhausen Day -
BBCSO - Royal Albert Hall, 2 August 2008
For the website www.musicalcriticism.com (now disabled)
The timing could not have been better. Less than eight months after Karlheinz Stockhausen’s death, this day of celebration of the composer’s life and work is a much awaited effort in marking the moment of Stockhausen’s music finally bursting out of the bubble that the composer had created around himself for decades by secluding himself and his close collaborators in the German village of Kürten.
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Full text linked here!
