Alban Berg
Is 'Lulu' the Best Opera the Met Has Ever Staged?
South African Jewish artist William Kentridge’s “Refuse the Hour” was a powerful work. But Anna Katsnelson says his production of Alban Berg’s “Lulu” at the Met is a phantasmagoric masterpiece.
The Belated Triumph of a Proto-Feminist Opera
“That was simply amazing!” a normally jaded music executive exclaimed to me after the second act of Franz Schreker’s provocative “Der Ferne Klang” (“The Distant Sound”). Hounded to death as a “degenerate” composer by the rising Nazis, Schreker’s defiantly louche, wildly successful 1909 opera disappeared and had to wait a century for its first American production at the Bard Summerscape Festival. Though belated, it was an exhilarating performance and a brilliant production of a thrilling, involving, distinctive genius of a work.
A 'Degenerate' Composer at Bard
Franz Schreker, an Austrian composer of Jewish descent who was hounded to an untimely death by the Nazis, has long been considered an unjustly forgotten genius.