PALO ALTO, Calif. — A Joan Mitchell painting looms at the top of the grand staircase at the Anderson Collection, Stanford University’s modern art museum here. It’s a sweaty, emotive work, bright colors moodily smeared across a huge canvas.
Thirty years ago, conductor Simon Rattle received a letter. It was from a teacher at Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester, England, telling Rattle about an extraordinarily talented teenage maestro there named Daniel Harding.
NEW YORK — Robert Ashley’s “Improvement (Don Leaves Linda)” isn’t the first opera to have its heroine pathetically forsaken in an American desert. Puccini’s “Manon Lescaut” starts its final act in one, with the title character “alone, lost, abandoned,” as she cries in a majestic outpouring of an aria.
Marcello Giordani, a heartfelt, stalwart and, at his best, inspired tenor who was a fixture at the Metropolitan Opera and other major houses around the world, died Saturday at his home in Augusta, Sicily. He was 56.
NEW YORK — Late in the third act of “Adriana Lecouvreur,” Francesco Cilea’s irresistible potboiler of an opera, vicious Princess de Bouillon and Adriana, an actress, square off at a party, rivals for the love of dashing Maurizio.
The moment took on new mystery and wonder, and the import of the opera’s conclusion — a timeless religious sphere quietly swallows up the transient concerns of governments and romances — was suddenly fresh.
It was funny to hear this coming from Donald Nally, the conductor of the Crossing, a choir devoted to new music that makes some of the prettiest sounds you’ll ever hear.
Well, no one could say that the quintet of protagonists of “The Central Park Five,” a jazz-infused new opera by Anthony Davis and Richard Wesley that was premiered on Saturday at the Warner Grand Theater here by Long Beach Opera, don’t deserve it.
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