Founded in 1947, the third and youngest of Berlin’s great opera houses is the Komische Oper—the comic opera. In the rubble of war, it took up residence in the late-nineteenth-century Metropol-Theater, beloved for its racy…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
Opera thrives on competition as much as collaboration—on who can sing higher, louder, longer, more passionately; what production can seduce or scandalize most abundantly; which company can hoard the most prestige while staving off bankruptcy…
Movie screenings here start with short commercials: zany, wink-wink spots showing more than a little sun and skin to whet the appetite for ice cream and beer and cars and beach vacations. In contrast to…
It’s a tough time to be a star conductor. When the world goes to hell, everyone wants to point the finger at the maestro—at the one whose job it is to point at others. Last…
Midway through its near non-stop, culture-packed calendar running from August 30th to September 24th, the Berlin Musikfest last weekend brought two French symphony orchestras to the German capital’s famed concert hall, the Philharmonie. On Friday,…
I had come from the State Library on my bike, a long-term rental courtesy of an excellent and cheap Dutch company called Swapfiets with outlets in many European cities. I’d just pedaled down Unter den…
Claudio Abbado was conducting Mussorgsky right next to the Dave Brubeck Quintet. The collision made crazy, coincidental sense, a compelling mash-up: Taking Five on Bald Mountain. Nearby, Elly Ameling sang Bach while leaning on a…
The evening light was a sickly sepia. The haze from the wildfires gave the clapboard houses on the steep hillside above one of Ithaca’s many gorges a simultaneously antique and apocalyptic cast. Down below in…