Doctor Atomic
The Met Opera made its filmed 2008 production of John Adams’s and Peter Sellars’s Doctor Atomic—which I’d never seen in its entirety—free to stream last...
Late music
The longer I spent not writing anything for the newsletter, the more pressure I felt to make the next email "good," whatever that means, which made it harder...
Ordinary time
A few Sundays ago, my parish church celebrated the feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the choir chanted the Salve Regina, the seasonal Marian antiphon,...
Summer reading
I have a cherished memory of watching Le Nozze di Figaro for the first time, on video, and being captivated by a certain scene in Act II. In Mozart’s opera,...
Die schöne Müllerin
Throughout the winter and early spring, I spent a lot of time listening to Schubert’s song cycle Die schöne Müllerin while I walked around the park, washed...
Hello again
I switched to Buttondown for my newsletter. Let me know if you run into any issues with it. You may like to know that I turned off email analytics (which I...
“A sadness that glows with understanding”
A few months ago, I read Alex Ross’s essay in the New Yorker on listening to Brahms’s music while mourning the death of his mother. It was one of the best...
Alleluia, alleluia
℟. Dum transisset sabbatum, Maria Magdalene et Maria Jacobi et Salome emerunt aromata ut venientes ungerent Jesum. Alleluia, alleluia.℣. Et valde mane una...
2019
By the numbers: total live performances: 33distribution of performances by location: uptown (24), midtown (6), downtown (2), “out of town” (1), Brooklyn and...
Brahms’s Requiem is Advent music
Is there anything sadder than finding an abandoned blog on the internet where the most recent post, from years ago, begins with an apology for not posting...
Soli Deo gloria
I’ve been reading The Danger of Music, a collection of essays by the musicologist and historian Richard Taruskin, and I have mixed feelings about it. I’m...
Summer hodgepodge
Summer is here, so one of the things I’ve been doing is watching non-live streams from European opera festivals in my non-air-conditioned living room. One of...
More operas
The best thing I saw at the Met this past season was, by a comfortable margin, Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites. (To be fair, the only other contenders...
Magnificat anima mea Dominum
The Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary is this Friday! Here’s an early Magnificat-themed special edition of this newsletter. You may be familiar with with...
The Met’s Ring
I saw the Met Opera’s Ring Cycle last week! For those of you fortunate enough to not have already heard about the Met’s Ring ad nauseam: This season, the Met...
Hello
After deleting all my social media accounts (which I know is a very boring and annoying thing to bring up), I realized that I miss writing about music in a...