New year, New York, new opera

Silvester fireworks in Mainz

I have an operatically eventful January ahead of me here in Germany: Enescu in Frankfurt, Verdi in München, hopefully a Wozzeck double-bill in Darmstadt, and if I can manage it, Elektra in Dresden. I am, believe it or not, planning to get some work done as well. But while all this excitement is keeping me busy over here, my beloved New York will also be having a very exciting month of opera. A recent bounty of press releases contained news too good not to share with you all, including new and new-to-NYC opera galore.

Schauerlich und süß: Pierrot Lunaire & L'Histoire du Soldat

"What an amazing score! An orchestra of five musicians. Sounds appeared, which never were heard before. Sometimes it sounded like an orchestra of 100." --Otto Klemperer on Pierrot Lunaire

"So sure was Schoenberg's touch in his incubus of a clown that it is as if the Pierrot into whom he breathed life has gone on to shape his own history, to frighten us into believing that he emerged from nowhere, has no ancestors, no attachments and, most provocatively, cannot die." -Jonathan Dunsby, Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire

Via Entartete Musik

It turns out that Schoenberg's music itself is far less intimidating to me than musicologists who write about it. I got myself a whole stack of books out of the library, and kept finding alarming utterances along the lines of "Indeed, this can seem thorny and impenetrable..." (Yes, the Really Shameful Confession here is that the only Schoenberg works I'd previously heard live were his first chamber symphony, some cabaret songs, and Pelleas und Melisande... nothing thorny and impenetrable.) So I looked at Schoenberg and his World, and Inside Pierrot Lunaire, and listened to the Sinopoli recording, and headed off to hear it on Saturday with great excitement, but also a certain amount of fear and trembling. Thanks to Operamission, I had a great time soaking it all in, along with a fierce rendition of Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat, and the rest of the audience in the space at the Gershwin Hotel seemed to as well. [Update: video of the performance is available here.]