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Fluid and Amorphous • VAN Magazine
A new autumn brings with it a new season from Vache Baroque, les nouveaux enfants terribles of Baroque opera. This year’s offering is André Campra’s 1699 opera-ballet “Le Carnaval de Venise,” which received its UK premiere 326 years overdue. Directed by James Hurley and conducted from the harpsichord by Vache’s cofounder Jonathan Darbourne, this production, […]
The Paternal Presence • VAN Magazine
The last time I saw Christoph von Dohnányi was at a lovely dinner at his apartment in Munich this last June. We were celebrating a positive health report his wife Barbara had just received and the mood was easy, relaxed, and convivial. The conversation with CvD covered enormous ground, as it always did—he spoke with […]
The Transcriber • VAN Magazine
Donde menos se piensa, salta la liebre—where you least expect it, the hare leaps. Sancho Panza’s proverb from the Second Part of Don Quijote conveys the suddenness with which insight can arrive. The hare leapt for me while reading Lydia Davis's essay “Demanding Pleasures: On the Art of Observation” in Harper's. Responding to the perennial […]
Low Note • VAN Magazine
In a video on the social media page High Note, an account launched on July 29 featuring “street interviews with classical music icons,” the tenor Freddie De Tommaso stands outside a pub drinking a Guinness, joking with a female interviewer about whether his favorite composer is Verdi, Puccini, or Sean Paul. In about 40 seconds, […]
The Other Wage Gap • VAN Magazine
It is a truth universally if quietly acknowledged that a singer in possession of work will be paid less than the orchestral instrumentalists with whom they perform. To continue reading, subscribe now. Subscribe from $4.99/month! Unlimited access to ourweekly issues and archives. Already have an account? Login here
Machine in the Gods • VAN Magazine
When Richard Wagner’s Festspielhaus opened in Bayreuth in 1876, it boasted the latest in theater technology. From its covered orchestra pit to its state-of-the-art lighting and stage machinery, the theater’s technical innovations were meant to mirror the composer’s experimentations with harmony, structure, and form. The Bayreuth Festival was inaugurated with the first complete performance of […]
A Life Told in Gestures • VAN Magazine
It is rare for there to be new developments in “Ring” cycle staging without dipping into the trashy, cynical, or ironic; in other words, without making the saga’s characters worse than they already are. The trend over the last ten years has been to embrace rather than ameliorate the weaknesses in Wagner’s text and, by […]
They Toll For Thee • VAN Magazine
Bells call people to pray, to mourn, to marry. They pass them news of war, peace, fire, and flood. On a sweltering August afternoon in London, they summoned me to the Royal Albert Hall. That night’s performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 from The Hallé at the BBC Proms was partly special because it was […]
Situations for Distracted Listening • VAN Magazine
Every time cultural organizers huddle to pick a festival theme, their brainstorming heat surely counts as a modest contribution to global warming. In today’s attention economy—where information is overabundant and rage-bait has surpassed click-bait like an evolved Pokémon—art institutions are forced to perform the same precarious dance, navigating survival and relevance under the increasingly standardized […]
The roots of orchestral music in Turkey • VAN Magazine
Lighting up mid-conversation, Murat Erginol sat at a coffee shop in the breezy, open-air halls of Atatürk Culture Center, Istanbul’s premier performing arts complex. Erginol, wispily bearded and quick to smile, is, among other accolades, first violinist of the Gedik Philharmonic Orchestra, one of Turkey’s many privately sponsored ensembles. Then rehearsing “The Four Seasons” by […]
The politics and beauty of "Appalachian Spring" • VAN Magazine
With Trump’s tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue and combat-fatigued foot soldiers guarding masked ICE agents in Los Angeles, who’s listening to “Appalachian Spring”? How does Aaron Copland’s World War II-era patriotic evocation of the American pastoral strike our ears in an era of xenophobic, gun-toting vigilantism, when small towns are propagandized as the last stand […]
The Depths of Darkness • VAN Magazine
“When I finish a cycle with Broadway tunes, or what I would call The Pops, there’s a release of energy. But, for the meat and potatoes of those concerts, I’m on my own. Of course, I’m not being told what to do, so it’s hard to think, well, how did that go over?” The rich, […]
What is the Work / What is the World • VAN Magazine
There is something strange in the ancient woodlands of Jeløya island. Were it not for the little orange sign staked into the ground, you might almost not notice it, so subtle is “The Grey Zone (NeverWhere),” an installation by Jacob Kirkegaard for this year’s edition of the Momentum Biennale in Norway. The loudspeakers are carefully […]
Confluence • VAN Magazine
“Into the Night,” a new work for sitar, Indian classical ensemble and orchestra by sitarist and composer Jasdeep Singh Degun, begins with a nocturnal luminescence. Warm shimmering string tremolos give a harmonic foundation, over which a sitar melody blooms with bright, undulating streams of notes. These solo melodies become energetic dialogues. The esraj (a bowed […]
A Covert Holiday • VAN Magazine
The recent release of political prisoners in Belarus became possible thanks to the consistent and targeted efforts of the United States. These efforts began a year ago under the Biden administration and yielded their first results in February 2025 with the release of both U.S. and Belarusian citizens. That month also marked the first time […]
Resistance & Vision • VAN Magazine
Resistance always resists more or less well, first of all against itself, more or less powerfully. And more is less here. A resistance is never simple, and might is always a play of resistances with an intensity differential. To continue reading, subscribe now. Subscribe from $3.99/month! Unlimited access to ourweekly issues and archives.