Susan Hall
Bio:
Recent Articles:
-
Oppenheimer, the Film Front Page
No Answers for Creative Impulses of Great Scientists
By: - Sep 04th, 2023Oppenheimer, the film. Prepare your rotten tomatoes. The movie is loud, gray and one-dimensional.
-
A Visit to Tippet Rise. Part II Front Page
A Special Staff for a Special Place
By: - Aug 27th, 2023Pete Hinmon and Lindsey Hinmon are Co-Directors of Tippet Rise Art Center. They are warm and deeply thoughtful, qualities you find in everyone at this working ranch. Qualities clearly treasured by the Halsteads, the couple creating this special art venue. The Halsteads have a knack for picking people.
-
A Visit to Tippet Rise, Part I Front Page
Local is the Future of Music and Art
By: - Aug 22nd, 2023Tippet Rise is the passionate expression of Cathy Halstead, a painter, and Peter Halstead, a polymath (poet, pianist, photographer, and novelist) who met when they were very young and have lived like two peas in a pod ever since. Having assembled about 12,500 acres in southern Montana not far from Yellowstone National Park, they have taken cues from the natural surroundings to build concert halls, place site-specific architecture and sculptures and produce an annual summer music festival which is a model for the future.
-
Tippet Rise Makes Music in Place Front Page
The Montana Ranch Home to Concerts and Sculpture
By: - Aug 09th, 2023Tippet Rise Art Center welcomes musicians and concertgoers for its eighth concert season, beginning August 18 and running through September 17. With more than 15 indoor and outdoor performances planned over five weekends, the season features a wide range of repertoire performed by artists who can be young trailblazers or legendary musicians. A highlight of this summer’s season is the debut of the new Wander series, which moves musicians and audiences between different works of art installed at the art center
-
Is it Thursday Yet at La Jolla Playhouse Front Page
Jenn Freeman and Sonya Tayeh Join Forces in Dance and Drama
By: - Aug 01st, 2023"Is it Thursday Yet", playing at the La Jolla Playhouse, tells the story of dancer Jenn Freeman, who was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) when she was 33 years old. Using actual recordings of her therapy sessions and home videos Jenn’s father recorded as she grew up, the play is essentially a documentary of Jenn Freeman’s life from infancy to young adulthood. Neither Jenn nor her family knew she had ASD.
-
Bach by Bike in Leipzig Front Page
A Trio Stops in the Summersaal
By: - Jul 31st, 2023An enthusiastic cyclist, violinist Marieke Neumann was the developer of the “Bach Bicycle Route” in central Germany, featuring guided tours to important locations from the composer’s life. Mezzo-soprano Anna-Luise Oppelt joins her for Bach by Bike to visit towns and cities where Johann Sebastian Bach lived and worked.
-
Katrin Hilbe at Berlin Opera Academy Front Page
Acting Skills Now Fundamental
By: - Jul 28th, 2023he advent of Freudianism somehow severed the mind from the body, but over the past decades, there has been a return to the wisdom of late 19th century philosopher William James who saw the body and mind as deeply interrelated.
-
Berkshire Opera Festival Brings in Boheme Front Page
Epic Love and Loss of Innocence Central to the Drama
By: - Jul 28th, 2023Berkshire Opera Festival continues its 2023 summer season with a mainstage production of La Bohème on August 26, August 29, and September 1 at The Colonial Theater in Pittsfield, MA. One of the most beloved operatic love stories of all time, La Bohème is based on Henri Murger's 1851 novel, Scènes de la vie de Bohème, which follows the lives of young people living in the Latin Quarter of Paris
-
Marina Carr at the Abbey Theatre Front Page
Dublin Looks at Girl on the Altar
By: - Jul 23rd, 2023Marina Carr has joined Lady Augusta Gregory in the pantheon of playwrights pictured on the walls of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Her new play "Girl on the Altar" is playing now.
-
Rhiannon Giddens Adds New Dimensions to Ojai Front Page
A New Silkroad Winds Across a Boundary-less World
By: - Jun 27th, 2023Rhiannon Giddens is leading new music which is both classical and popular. Her commitment to telling stories that have been buried and to showing us the world as it really is in music heralds anew age.
-
Ojai Festival on Historic Journey Front Page
Rhiannon Giddens Programs All Music
By: - Jun 22nd, 2023At the 2023 Ojai music festival, Rhiannon Giddens, musical director, and a supremely talented group of musicians, presented a program that challenged the audience to take a musical journey with them around the world.
-
A Sex-Positive Xerxes Front Page
Komische Oper's Ecstatic Production
By: - Jun 19th, 2023Handel’s Xerxes is a sex-positive party in this ecstatic production presented by Komische Oper. The theater itself is a beautiful little jewel box seating about 1200 people, an intimate setting appropriate to a production that would highlight intimacy.
-
Experiments in Opera Presents Anthony Braxton Front Page
Feisty Opera Company Improvises at The Brick
By: - Jun 18th, 2023In 1999, Anthony Braxton caught the performance of an Improv group at Wesleyan College where he has taught for twenty-three years. Among its members was Lin Manuel Miranda. He picked a trooper and asked him to do an improvisation with him. The duo, collaborating on compositions 279 to 283, was the inspiration for this funny, hip and moving improv designed by Experiments in Opera (EiO).
-
Susan Rennie Subverts the Male Gaze Front Page
Artist's Work on View in Venice, California
By: - Jun 16th, 2023Long before the Brooklyn Museum discovered the notorious Hannah Gadsby of "Nanette" and engaged her services as a curator of Pablo Picasso, Susan Rennie was gripped by the idea that art most often was created by the male gaze.
-
The Doctor at Park Avenue Armory Front Page
Is it Possible to Function in Fully Human Mode
By: - Jun 16th, 2023Arthur `Schnitzler's play "Professor Bernhardi" has been completely rewritten by director Robert Icke, who takes the action from 1900 Vienna to present-day Britain. Now called "The Doctor", it was a smash hit in London and is running until August 19th at the Park Avenue Armory in New York.
-
Love All at the La Jolla Playhouse Front Page
Billie Jean King Wins This Match
By: - Jun 15th, 2023Love All, a new play by Anna Deavere Smith and directed by Marc Bruni, is running at the La Jolla Playhouse through July 2. 'Love all' is the score of a tennis match before it starts. It is a word used often during the course of a game. It means zero. And that is what athletes were making when Billie Jean Moffit (later King) started playing tennis. She also loved men and women.
-
Rhiannon Giddens Curates Ojai. Part I Front Page
Spiritual and Historic Journey
By: - Jun 13th, 2023Rhiannon Giddens curated the Ojai Music Festival this year. She often sings “I shall not be moved.” And yet, in the strong force you feel in her wake, you know and feel she is moving and you are moved. Giddens is fond of the double and triple entendre. For four days we are sailing with her and we are also in her wake.
-
Lucia di Lammermoor at Deutsch Opera Front Page
One of Three Choices
By: - Jun 08th, 2023A charming throwback, or, The High School Musical version, of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor at Deutsch Oper, Berlin
-
Curtis Stewart Erupts at Merkin Hall Front Page
Kaufman Music Center Produces Ecstatic Music
By: - Jun 04th, 2023Curtis Stewart is a man for all seasons. He took over Merkin Hall at the Kaufman Center this week. When you hear him, you know that Nietzsche was right: without music, life would be a mistake.
-
Flying Dutchman Transports at the Met Opera Front Page
Francois Girard in Top Form as Producer
By: - May 31st, 2023The new Flying Dutchman at the Metropolitan Opera transports. Grounded shortly after its debut as the pandemic erupted in March of 2020, the cast has changed. Like many of the Met's new productions, singing is excellent across the board and gives great pleasure.
-
Rhiannon Giddens Directs at Ojai Front Page
Giddens Tells The Whole Story
By: - May 29th, 2023Each year at the Ojai Festival in California a different Music Director is given the freedom and the resources to imagine four days of musical brainstorming. Ojai’s signature blend of an enchanted setting and an audience voracious in its appetite for challenge and discovery has inspired a distinguished series of musical innovators—from Pierre Boulez, Aaron Copland, and Igor Stravinsky and Jeremy Denk, Dawn Upshaw and Barbara Hannigan. John Adams has directed twice.
-
Tan Dun Conducts TON Front Page
Rose Theater in New York Becomes an Aviary
By: - May 24th, 2023Tan Dun became famous for his Academy Award-winning track for Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger. A crossover classical composer who grew up in the country in China, and had not heard Beethoven until he was eighteen, he has made a career, merging East and West, using the conventions and tonalities of each culture. This merger is most effective in his operas, symphonies and concertos.
-
Chad Smith Appointed President and CEO of BSO Front Page
Good News for Boston
By: - May 16th, 2023Chad Smith is a visionary credited with advancing the orchestral music tradition through cutting-edge programming and cultivating industry-defining partnerships. Smith brings strategic expertise, commitment to musical excellence, and a tested ability to expand audiences and generate revenue.
-
Art Bath's De Gustation Front Page
Making Multi Media Art for the Masses
By: - May 15th, 2023Elizabeth Yilmaz and Mara Driscoll, two dancers from the Metropolitan Opera troupe, have created a performance series that’s as wonderful as it is unique. The final performance of the spring season, and the 9th produced by this team with associate Cesar Abreu, was in the spirit of a happening.
-
Boheme La La La at Opera Philadelphia Front Page
Helping Opera Live in the 21st Century
By: - May 11th, 2023Opera Philadelphia is ahead of the curve in keeping the operatic form alive and relevant. New operas and altered operas inevitably raise the question: What is opera? Music drives a story or an idea. That is at opera’s heart. La Boheme in Philadelphia meets the standard and then some.
<< Previous Next >>