I just finished seeing the latest San Francisco Opera installment of Wagner's Ring Cycle, Siegfried. I've seen it live five or six times in my life now, and feel that my experience level has reached the Barely-Dangerous stage, though nowhere near the Very-Dangerous stage addict who sat next to me once who'd seen it 47 times. So, now that I'm an obstreperous junior at Wagner Citadel U, my return visits to class are beginning to saddle me with ever-so-ponderable questions. Niebelungenfragen, ...

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The NY Times critic Anthony Tommasini has asked his reading public to respond to what he characterizes as a "playful" approach to the age-old question, "What makes music great?" Tommasini has cut some videos and performed short lectures on traits of composers that could be proposed as great and in the interior of a paragraph asks readers, "Please challenge my analysis. Propose your own approaches." Rather than wait for Tommasini to complete his analyses or even view one of them, hundreds of ...

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Franz Liszt’s Totentanz gets a bad press. This extravaganza of variations on the Dies Irae for piano and orchestra has been called “a ridiculously overblown piece of boom-boom music” by one critic, and larded with “heavy-footed exhibitionism” by another. For a would-be pianist like me, however, it’s more than a just guilty pleasure to experience it in concert: It is so full of unabashed key banging and jaw-dropping pyrotechics that it amounts to aural-visual primal-scream therapy.  ...

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Michael Steinberg’s program notes declared: 

The Symphony No. 1 is the culmination of Walton’s conquest of maturity. One can make a strong case that this music is at a level of compositional ambition, concentration, and sheer human urgency and strength that Walton would not reach again.

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Most reviews comment on or elaborate on the Pucciniesqueness of Daniel Catán’s new opera, based on the film about the friendship of the poet Pablo Neruda with his postman while exiled on an Italian island. Writers have been comparing it to Tosca and La Boheme. Puccini is given too much credit more deserved by Catán himself, and others. Why? Who?   Reviewers may confuse a thematic similarity too much with a musical one. Catán’s opera, rapturously received by the ...

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Over two weeks, and a mile or so from the Surfing Museum in Santa Cruz, California, Marin Alsop brought a dozen living composers and their music to the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. Famous composers—people like John Adams, Jennifer Higdon, Philip Glass, and Mark Anthony Turnage. A bevy of critics were in attendance to opine on one or more of the several concerts, including yours truly.  The result was one of the better of the 19 series I’ve been attending, starting with the first one Alsop directed in 1992. ...

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