Stephen Totter News
American opera singer
- baritone
- United States of America
- opera singer
Last update
2024-03-29
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2016-08-02 14:57:17
Wer ein solches Weib errungen
After a long, lackluster Aureliano in Palmira (friends and I left after the nearly two-hour first act), Opera at Caramoor rallied Sunday afternoon with an admirable if erratic performance of Fidelio which was especially memorable for South African soprano Elza van den Heever’s thrilling first-ever Leonore. Many were surprised when Beethoven’s masterpiece (performed with minimal German dialogue) was announced as part of this year’s Bel Canto at Caramoor series which tends to focus on works by Donizetti, Rossini and Bellini (next summer’s centerpiece will be Il Pirata starring Angela Meade on July 8) conducted by Will Crutchfield. I suspect Fidelio may have been chosen because Pablo Heras-Casado, the music director of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s—the festival’s resident band, wanted to conduct it. If so, it’s ironic then that Heras-Casado’s frequently perverse and superficial reading was the afternoon’s weakest feature. His insistence on waiting for applause after every number […]
Norman Lebrecht - Slipped disc
2016-05-22 12:35:44
How a string quartet copes with its errors
Some serious inside talk this week from Anthea Kreston, American violinist in the Berlin-based Artemis Quartet. What do you do when someone says, you made a mistake? Essential reading for all musicians. Jonas Salk, the man who discovered the polio vaccine, said, “life is an error-making and error-correcting process”. When I was a freshman at the University of Minnesota at age 16, my first semester’s plate of courses included an “Intro to Sociology” course which made big impressions on me in many ways. Firstly – I was one of 350 students in a cavernous sub-basement bunker-type hall, and the teacher stood behind a large desk, miked, and used a wall of chalk-board and an overhead projector. I was completely overwhelmed by the situation as well as the amount, complexity and speed of learning we were expected to master. I couldn’t even really make out the features of the teacher, […]
2016-03-25 14:00:23
Very old things for very new needs
With recent events in politics, it is becoming ever clearer that humankind hasn’t evolved much since the Enlightenment. Just consider Bernie Sanders’ Presidential campaign, hinging on economic inequality. Or, for that matter, Donald Trump, demanding we build a barrier on our border with Mexico. The working classes still bash their fists against the brick walls of privilege, and we endlessly Totter on the brink of revolution. So maybe it takes a fresh look at Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro to see how clearly Beaumarchais’ Siècle des Lumières shines fresh light on our current cultural and political predicaments. ¡Figaro! (90210) is currently offering such an opportunity, playing a limited engagement through April 3 at the Duke on 42nd Street. ¡Figaro! (90210), as you might have guessed, is a shortened re-contextualization of Mozart’s operatic warhorse, Le nozze di Figaro, set in present-day Beverly Hills. While much of Mozart’s music is retained, […]
Norman Lebrecht - Slipped disc
2015-04-05 09:28:52
On the benefits of cultural migration
A piece I wrote for this weekend’s JC magazine When Swiss Cottage spoke German © Norman Lebrecht, all rights reserved By the time my generation moved in, not much was left of the Emigration beyond a tinkling of pianos in Canfield Gardens and a daylong cluster of grey heads in the Cosmo restaurant. The Emigra-zion, always capitalised, ending in a Hebrew-German twist, was made up of Jews who fled Europe between 1933 and 1939, settling in a triangular axis around an Alp-themed pub on a busy North London thoroughfare. What drew the refugees to Swiss Cottage is uncertain, but they gathered in such critical mass that bus conductors would shout, as they neared the pub, ‘this stop for British West Hampstead!’ Ranging across two postal districts, NW3 and NW6, they included the founder of psychoanalysis, a future Nobel Prize winner for Literature, the pioneering […]
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