Philip Glass began his operatic career in the 1970s and ’80s with a trilogy focused on great visionaries of history: “Einstein on the Beach”; “Satyagraha,” a meditation on Gandhi’s early activism; and “Akhnaten,” about the Egyptian pharaoh who pioneered monotheism, which runs through Dec. 7 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. (It will be broadcast to movie theaters worldwide Saturday.)
NEW YORK — There’s a Kurt Weill musical playing at New York City Center. It’s well-cast and smartly produced (if clearly on a budget). There is some playful choreography and attractive costuming. It sounds great, particularly the pit musicians, who are using a recent critical edition of Weill’s score.
The firebrand composer and conductor Pierre Boulez once wrote that it is essential that a creative artist “hides his first attempts and destroys his traces.” By withdrawing from circulation several works from his apprentice years, Boulez showed he was willing to follow his own advice.
(Critic's Notebook): NEW YORK — Walking up the stairs of the Met Breuer last week, British artist Oliver Beer pressed his face into a corner and began singing a slow succession of descending pitches. When he landed on a B flat, the walls suddenly vibrated with sympathetic resonance.
AMSTERDAM — When Friedrich Nietzsche turned his pen on his onetime friend, Richard Wagner, his overarching critique was that grandeur shouldn’t be mistaken for depth.
On the evidence of her concert Friday night at the Kitchen, she is not feeling bogged down yet. Nor does she seem likely to court ennui in the immediate future.
At the Juilliard School, pianist Aaron Diehl studied both classical and jazz traditions. And in the years since, he’s chosen to follow each of those paths — and sometimes both, simultaneously.
On Sunday at the Appel Room, at Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Philharmonic fielded a “Sound On” program that was one of its most entertaining new-music shows of the past couple of years.
This was “Trillium L,” the next opera in his long-gestating cycle of works for the stage. Each act of a “Trillium” opera tells a different story, while using the same cast of singers, who rotate roles.
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