AMSTERDAM — A scrum of international TV reporters, photographers and other media packed the Gallery of Honor at the Rijksmuseum on a recent spring morning, while producers negotiated with publicists for time to shoot spots in front of Rembrandt’s 1642 painting “The Night...
Lang Lang
BERLIN — In a hotel in the embassy-heavy streets in the city’s center, Lang Lang sits on a bright red couch, a modestly daring complement to the room’s elaborate Bauhaus paneling. He has just come from a conference in Cannes where he gave a speech to the who’s who of the music biz about classical music, social media and building music schools in China. The window is open and outside, a woman shouts enthusiastically into a megaphone. Her acolytes answer her calls with equal vim. Inside the normally happy-go-lucky, 30-year-old pianist is doing some protesting of his own. When he plays with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at...
Ukulele Orchesta of ...
DORTMUND, Germany — At 5:30 p.m. backstage at a concert hall here a few weeks ago, a security guard delivers a small brown bag from a chocolate shop in Paris. Devouring the contents is not a folk-rock pixie and her gang of bearded sidemen but eight mostly middle-aged ukulele players. Still,...
6 Valentine’s ...
Valentine’s Day: a symbol of the eros-industrial complex created by a cabal of rose growers, chocolatiers, jewelers and calligraphers or the perfect time for true romantics to show the rest of us how it is done? Culture Monster has analyzed the situation and determined that because music...
Beck: Song Reader
“Not so long ago,” writes Beck Hansen in the introduction to his new collection of tunes, “Song Reader,” “a song was only a piece of paper until it was played by someone.” Indeed, as far back as “Pride and Prejudice,” all card-carrying members of...
German Xmas Markets
COLOGNE, Germany — On a street corner in the old part of Cologne, a boy of 9 or 10 approximates Christmas songs on his trumpet. Around him, the elaborate huts of the Altstadt Christmas market play a siren song audible only to ladies of a certain age and their long-suffering husbands. Booths...
Landfillharmonic
In the Paraguayan capital of Asuncion, there is a village called Cateura built practically on top of the city’s main landfill. Families eke out a living sorting through the trash and selling whatever valuables they can find. Like many high poverty areas, drugs and gangs are rampant and...
O Holy Night
Caruso, Bjorling, Pavarotti, Carreras, Domingo, Alagna, Kaufmann, Florez and (Eric) Cartman. One of these things is not like the other, ’tis true, but there is one way in which they are kind of the same: They have all recorded versions of “O Holy Night.” In fact it seems...
Martha Wainwright
On Black Friday – the day after Thanksgiving – most people in the US are either camping out for a chance to buy cut-price electronics or preparing enough turkey sandwiches to nourish them through three solid days of American football. Canadian-American singer Martha Wainwright is spending...
The Philharmonia Tours The US
LONDON — It’s late afternoon south of the Thames. Outside Henry Wood Hall, the first winter winds dance leaves and cigarette packages while dusk further smudges an already-gray sky. Inside the deconsecrated Georgian church, a man is being driven to murder. His accomplices, the Philharmonia Orchestra and its principal conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, are nearly halfway through six hours of rehearsing Alban Berg’s first opera, “Wozzeck.” In performance, the title character’s transformation from gentle soldier to wife-killer takes just 90 minutes. The 104 musicians occupy one of the few spaces in London where...
Come On Ring Those B...
LONDON — Britain was alive with the sound of bells at 8:12 this morning to signify the first day of the 2012 Olympic Games. Church bells, cow bells, hand bells, Big Ben, bicycle bells, doorbells; bells on Morris Dancers, Bangladeshi girls and ships — all rang as quickly and loudly as...
Salonen Carries Olym...
LONDON — On its 69th and penultimate day of touring, the Olympic torch has been carried nearly 8,000 miles by sports heroes, pop stars, actors and thousands of everyday people. On Thursday, it was the turn of Esa-Pekka Salonen, principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra and...
Meet The Shard
LONDON — Look up. Waaaay up. Well, not quite that far. This isn’t New York, after all. The Shard, England’s newest and tallest skyscraper stands alone on the south bank of the Thames here, between the government lawyers and CEOs to the north and Canary Wharf bankers to the...
To See Or Not To See
LONDON — For those who leave modern art exhibitions feeling like Charlie Brown after Lucy has yanked the football yet again, take heart. From now until Aug. 5, you can head to the Hayward Gallery in London, plunk down 8 pounds and see absolutely nothing. Mostly. “Invisible: Art...
Queen Elizabeth at t...
LONDON–Since her coronation in 1952, Queen Elizabeth II has been painted, photographed and deconstructed more than anyone on Earth. A billion people carry her likeness around in their pockets every day — not as a totem or religious icon but rather more practically as something to...
Philharmonia Orchestra: Universe of Sound
LONDON — It’s the half-term school holiday in London and the Science Museum is crawling with children eager to look at steam engines, airplanes and satellites. This month, just past the steel-wheeled tractors and next door to the space exhibit, there is also music. Universe of Sound, an installation developed by Esa-Pekka Salonenand the Philharmonia Orchestra as part of the London 2012 Festival, the cultural component of the Summer Olympics, uses Gustav Holst’s “The Planets,” heaps of high-definition video and a couple of Microsoft Kinects to turn the orchestra inside out. Seeing an orchestra play live is often a...
Chelsea Fringe Garde...
LONDON — The weather in Britain is famously miserable. Unless you’re an umbrella maker. Or a plant. As collectors found in the 18th and 19th centuries, the long growing season, temperate climate and easy access to water meant that no matter how exotic its provenance, pretty well...
Foster The People
It’s late April in Brixton, South London, and the Los Angeles band Foster the People is due on stage in two hours. Kids are lined up around three sides of the O2 Academy, chatting and texting while the dads roped into chaperoning stare into the middle distance in an effort to appear even one...
Power Pointe
At the end of a murky hallway in the working-class east London neighborhood of Hackney, 12 men stand at battered workbenches under unflattering fluorescent lights. One wields a nail gun; another bangs away with a hammer. Machines hum. There is something severe and decidedly masculine about the...
Freed of London
LONDON — Tucked away in the side streets of Mayfair, the world-famous tailors of Savile Row make gentleman’s suiting to order for businessmen, gentry, politicians, oligarchs and Saudi princes. Six miles to the east, in Hackney, lies another temple to old-school English craftsmanship:...
Jackie Evancho 18 Mo...
It’s been 18 months since soprano Jackie Evancho charmed the nation as a finalist on TV’s “America’s Got Talent.” In that time, she’s had a gold record, a platinum EP and a PBS special and has managed to sell out Avery Fisher Hall. Not bad for a girl from...