Kurt Weill

Latest Articles

Get thee to the Apohadion for a masterful show

Shell out for Threepenny
The lurching black satire of The Threepenny Opera is a study in grotesques: Monstrous caricatures of amorality and the blade of the bottom line are both repellent and ridiculously entertaining in this 1928 musical condemnation of capitalism.
By MEGAN GRUMBLING | September 21, 2011

Opera from BLO, the Met, and Teatro Lirico, plus top-level conducting at the BSO

Good works
Opera in Boston is now back in full swing. Boston Lyric Opera, with a company of singers and designers largely new to Boston led by Boston Classical Orchestra music director Steven Lipsitt, gave a memorable production of the opera that composer Viktor Ullmann and poet Petr Kien created in 1943 at the Terezín concentration camp, The Emperor of Atlantis , or Death Quits .
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | February 15, 2011

Review: Viktor Ullmann's The Emperor of Atlantis

Boston Lyric Opera pulls out the stops
The Boston Lyric Opera, with Boston Classical Orchestra music director Steven Lipsitt and a company of singers and designers largely new to Boston, has given us a memorable production of the opera that composer Viktor Ullmann and poet Petr Kien created in 1943 at the Terezín concentration camp, The Emperor of Atlantis, or Death Quits .
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | February 03, 2011

Transformations

Young Frankenstein at the Opera House; The Blonde, the Brunette and the Vengeful Redhead in Lowell
As fans of the film are aware, that precipitous crag atop which the castle of Young Frankenstein sits is a Catskill. But in The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein (at the Opera House through May 2), the mountain is shrouded less in 1930s-horror-movie gloom than in Vegas glitz.
By CAROLYN CLAY | April 27, 2010

What's new

BMOP, and the Christian Wolff festival
The timely highlight of Gil Rose’s latest BMOP (Boston Modern Orchestra Project) concert, “Strings Attached,” was a new/old piece (2004, revised 2009) for two string orchestras by Scott Wheeler now called Crazy Weather — the new title taken from a John Ashbery poem that begins, “It’s this crazy weather we’ve been having.”
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | March 23, 2010

Welsh rarebit

Boston Lyric Opera's imported Ariadne
Boston Lyric Opera hasn't had much success lately with either its home-grown or its second-hand products, but its latest import — the Welsh National Opera's 2004 production of Ariadne auf Naxos, Richard Strauss's third collaboration with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, his favorite librettist — is a charmer.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | March 16, 2010

The good old days

Max Raabe & Palast Orchester, live at the Paramount Theatre, March 6, 2010
As if it weren’t enough that the venerable Paramount Theatre on Washington Street was open for the first time since 1976, the Celebrity Series of Boston brought in as the initial act to play the new 600-seat mainstage Max Raabe and his Palast Orchester.
By JEFFREY GANTZ | March 11, 2010

Interview: Max Raabe

Killer cabaret: bringing Berlin to Boston
"It was so crazy in the '20s, in the Weimar Republic. Everything was so open-minded and wide, and that is why I love that period so much."
By JEFFREY GANTZ | March 02, 2010

Double trouble

BLO's The Turn of the S crew, Levine's Carter and Simon Boccanegra, Teatro Lirico, the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet, and more
Boston Lyric Opera's debut Opera Annex production was so good in so many ways, it's painful that one bad idea just about sank it.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | February 09, 2010

Let's rock

The BSO, the Cantata Singers, Discovery Ensemble, and BCMS
WGBH radio has ended its 58-year tradition of live Friday-afternoon BSO broadcasts, and it doesn't seem that public outcry is going to change that.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | January 25, 2010

2009: The year in Classical

Beating the quease
This was a queasy year for classical music.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | January 04, 2010

Schnozzola!

Opera Boston doesn't blow The Nose — plus Yannick Nézet-Séguin's BSO debut and the return of Lang Lang
By the time you read this, you've either seen or missed one of Boston's most exciting opera productions, Opera Boston's brilliant version of Shostakovich's The Nose .
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | March 05, 2009

Year in Classical: Celebrate!

Comings and goings
In Handel's Hercules, the demented Dejanira's loss is still so painful, I was afraid to listen; now I don't want to hear anything else.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | December 22, 2008

Woof!

The BSO’s Carmina burana, the Cantata Singers, the Boston Camerata, and BLO’s Tales of Hoffmann
Probably most music lovers wouldn’t head their greatest-composer list with Carl Orff, despite the popularity of his violent, garish, sumptuously tuneful Carmina burana .
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | November 13, 2008

Opening pitch

James Levine’s gala and Brahms, Russell Sherman’s Liszt, the Bostonians’ Kurt Weill
The most moving moment of this year’s Boston Symphony Orchestra opening gala came before the concert started — the standing ovation for James Levine, who looked rested and recuperated after his kidney surgery this summer, an operation that forced him to cancel most of his Tanglewood season.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | October 01, 2008

Grand finales

The Cantata Singers’ Weill retrospective, Mark Morris leading Dido , Chorus pro Musica’s Carmen
Jeffrey Rink has just ended his 18th and final season as music director of Chorus pro Musica. He’ll be missed.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | June 03, 2008

Split personality

Jenny Scheinman gets herself together
Jenny Scheinman is such an unassuming, modest musician that it’s easy to underestimate the radicalness of her two new CDs, Jenny Scheinman and Crossing the Field .
By JON GARELICK | June 02, 2008

All over again

Brahms from Levine and Kissin, Emmanuel’s Bach B-minor Mass, the Cantata Singers’ Kurt Weill cabaret
The Boston Symphony Orchestra program for last week’s four concerts was a familiar one.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | January 28, 2010

Is there a pianist in the house?

A last-minute Emperor at the BSO, Gatti and Ohlsson, BLO’s Elisir, and Brahms meets Weill with the Cantata Singers
Moved and excited by pianist Leon Fleisher in Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with the Boston Symphony, I wanted to hear it again.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | March 18, 2008