Marlboro at 60 - a Look Back, with a Schedule of Touring Concerts 2010-11

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Scenes from Marlboro

So much is out of joint in the United States, that it is easy to fall into the direst of pessimistic attitudes. When I find myself sinking too deep into thoughts of decay and dissolution, the first thing to buoy up my spirits is the ubiquity of chamber music in this country. This is only an impression, but in no other place in the world does it seem so easy to find chamber music on any given weekend. I am writing from the Berkshires, of course, a small region with an extraordinary concentration of summer chamber music festivals. But even now in November, an hour's drive will almost invariably lead me to chamber music, which has become a fixture among regional arts centers, music programs, churches, museums, liberal arts colleges, and universities, and not only in the Northeast.

Read the full article on the Berkshire Review, an international journal for the Arts!

Michael Miller




OPERA America Launches the North American Opera Journal, an online scholarly journal about opera in the Western Hemisphere.

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North American Opera Journal, from OPERA America

I am quite excited to announce the publication of the inaugual issue of the North American Opera Journal (NAOJ), not least for the purely selfish reason that it contains an article of my own about concert opera in America, above all, its musical and dramative function in our opera-going lives. It also contains “Porgy and Bess as a Human-Interest Opera” by James Parakilas, “The Operas of Elie Siegmeister (1909-1991)” by Leonard J. Lehrman, “Leontyne Price: An Interview” by Peter Dickinson. These should all be of compelling interest, and they all reach to the core of opera in America — a powerful tradition which is severely underestmated, even here on these shores.

For details, I can do no better than Opera America's own announcement:

New York, NY—OPERA America, the national 

Read the full announcement on the Berkshire Review, an international journal for the Arts!

Michael Miller




Boston Lyric Opera, Tosca, November 16th, Shubert Theater, by Charles Warren

Floria Tosca (soprano Jill Gardner) makes a drastic decision to protect herself and her love from Baron Scarpia (bass-baritone Bradley Garvin). Photo Jeffrey Dunn for Boston Lyric Opera © 2010.


It has been interesting to see Boston Lyric Opera’s production of Puccini’s Tosca

 just a few weeks after seeing Opera Boston’s production of Beethoven’sFidelio, just down the street at the Cutler Majestic Theater. The two operas, in their very different ways, invoke a powerful atmosphere of political repression — the world in which everyone lives, the trap that everyone is caught in, the air that everyone breathes — and in both cases a woman at the center of things wreaks havoc with the status quo. Kierkegaard, writing about Mozart’s Don Giovanni, says that music is by nature seductive and thus that Mozart had found the perfect subject — seduction — for music drama to spin out and reflect upon. The music of Fidelio seduces our better, aspiring selves into acceptance of a good and persistent and forceful woman character, and acceptance of the idea that the desire for liberation on the part of the oppressed can be answered, that the blazing sun can break through. 
Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an international journal for the Arts!

Michael Miller




Michael Francis debuts with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra...Rufus Wainwright bores, by Steven Kruger

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Michael Francis. Photo: Chris Christodoulou


The San Francisco Symphony
Davies Hall, San Francisco
Saturday, November 13, 2010

Michael Francis, Conductor

Milhaud - La Création du monde,Opus 81 (1923)
Wainwright - Five Shakespeare Sonnets (2010)
Rufus Wainwright, Vocalist
Weill - Symphony No. 2 (1934)

One of the consolations of living in a successful middle-class society, I think, is to experience the evaporation of self-consciously plug-ugly proletarian art and music. Many of the last century's early musical compositions seem today unnecessarily obsessed with wheezing 'round the campfire, banging on pots and pans, or otherwise ramming washtub crudities down the listener's throat. Even where it isn't that obvious, the blue-collar bias can be detected: "Barefoot Songs" by Tubin. "Hammersmith" by Holst, Milhaud's "Le Boeuf sur le toit,” and of course, almost everything by Copland. Just under the surface of most music from the 1920s and 30s, you could say, lies a post office mural. And like post office murals, sometimes it is great art, sometimes propaganda, and sometimes just not worthy of restoration.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an international journal for the Arts!

Michael Miller




It’s Twilight Time With the Australian Ballet by Andrew Miller

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The Australian Ballet presents three short recent ballets which would seem at the surface to have nothing in common. In At the Edge of Night, first performed in 1997, but last performed 11 years ago, Stephen Baynes sets an impressionist ballet to seven preludes by Rachmaninov. The choreography, set design and costumes share the sensibility of the music, rolling subtly between nostalgia, longing, pining,  contemplation, mild remorse, occasionally melancholy, ambivalence, poignant joy and other emotions only the piano can give a name. The brand new ballet, Halcyon by Tim Harbour, sets the Greek myth of Halcyon and Ceyx to dance with original music by Gerard Brophy. It is a particularly relevant myth about love oppressed by religion. The last ballet is Molto Vivace again by Stephen Baynes, first performed in 2003, but completely different in tone. It sets a light-hearted rococo comedy to Handel. All three are liminal, either touching, delving or diving into where phases change. We meet frontiers either as precise as the sea's surface, or as blurred as half conscious memories, or as completely black and mysterious as that between life and death and the other.

Read the full review on The Berkshire Review, an international journal of the arts

Alan Miller

I Grandi Veneti: da Pisanello a Tiepolo. Chiostro del Bramante (Rome), by Daniel B. Gallagher

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Lorenzo Lotto, Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine, with the Donor Niccolò Bonghi, 1523. OIl on Canvas.


I Grandi Veneti da

 Pisanello a Tiziano da Tintoretto a Tiepolo. Chiostro del Bramante (Rome) until January 30th. Curated by Carlo Valagussa, Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa.

The temporary closure of the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo for renovations has made it possible for Rome to host a portion of its prestigious collection in Bramante’s charming urban cloister. The exhibit spans more than two centuries of Venetian painting — from Bellini and Carpaccio to Tiepolo and the vedutisti — elegantly arranged by Giovanni Federico Villa and Giovanni Valagussa, with an ambitious catalogue.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an international journal for the Arts!

Michael Miller




200 years in a Day: Sydney Open 2010 by Alan Miller

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Sydney Open is one of the best things you can do in this town. Organized by the Historic Houses Trustevery two years, the event allows access to more than fifty important Sydney buildings, many of them normally off limits to the public. A City Pass allowed access to dozens of building in downtown Sydney, as well as properties run by the Trust, which are well worth visiting at any time of year. I purchased a City Pass and planned my route carefully, like a marathon runner at a free buffet, to take in as much as possible, from sandstone Georgian to High Tech and beyond. The buildings covered virtually every period of Sydney’s post-1788 history, and present a golden opportunity for a cheap and cheerful romp through the history of the city’s architecture.

Read the full article on The Berkshire Review, an international journal of the arts!

Alan Miller

Fellini and Rigoletto by Andrew Miller

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In a way this production is better Fellini than Fellini. Allowing influence from his films without being overly enamoured of them, Director Elijah Moshinsky manages to draw the opera into the modern era while intensifying Verdi's tight drama. It would have been easy to let the great filmmaker's sardonic sense of humour to infiltrate the opera and mock or belittle the characters to avoid falling too deeply into them, but on the contrary, the company seemed almost always to be sensitive to the characters. Verdi's creation is remarkable how it holds such an intense dramatic tension for so long and with a story which could easily seem an uphill slog. He also manages somehow to keep some sympathy for Rigoletto and ambiguity for the Duke despite their despicable actions. As for the curse, though it is Monterone who first vocalises it, it is really Rigoletto who brings it down on himself.

Read the full review on The Berkshire Review, an international Journal of the Arts!

Alan Miller