Upcoming Tours

Glimmerglass

The Glimmerglass Festival (August 2020) - CANCELLED

Cooperstown is more than just baseball. The village at the southern tip of New York's Otsego Lake is also home to the Glimmerglass Festival, known for exciting opera productions that feature singers, directors and designers from around the world. At Glimmerglass, we will see two highlights of the 2020 festival, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s beloved The Sound of Music and Wagner’s rarely staged Die Feen. We will be staying at the historic Otesaga Resort Hotel, a Cooperstown landmark noted for its impeccable hospitality, first-class accommodations and fine dining. Other highlights of this tour include visits to sites linked to the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers, two of the most celebrated families of the Gilded Age. CANCELLED

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Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh & Falling Water (October 2020) - CANCELLED

Pittsburgh’s steel mills closed long ago and today it regularly tops the lists of 'best cities to live' and 'coolest neighborhoods' in America. This tour’s musical highlights will be performances by its symphony, opera and ballet in the restored, grand movies palaces which they call home. In addition to Pittsburgh’s great museums bearing the names of Carnegie, Frick, Heinz and Warhol, we will visit Falling Water, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for Edgar Kaufmann, scion of a Pittsburgh department store magnate, and the 9/11 Flight 93 National Memorial. (October 16-19, 2020)

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Philadelphia

Philadelphia - Art, Music & Film (January 2021) - CANCELLED

Brace yourself for an eclectic Philadelphia experience. For classical music lovers, there will be Opera Philadelphia’s performances of Stravinsky’s Les Noces and Oedipus Rex (described by Leonard Bernstein as the Russian composer’s ‘most awesome’ work) at the ornate Academy of Music, the oldest opera house in the United States. Film buffs will delight in Jurassic Park projected in HD with the Philadelphia Orchestra performing John’s Williams’ score. There will be also be private guided tours of the Barnes Foundation and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as well visits to Fonthill Castle and the Mercer Museum, where one enters the world of an American original — archeologist, artifact collector, tile-maker and designer Henry Mercer. (January 29-31, 2020)

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Performance Reviews

New York

Brooklyn Art Song Society’s Schubert cycle continues at the start of 2021 with Winterreise

This performance of Schubert's Winterreise by baritone Steven Eddy and pianist Michael Brofman conveys a subtle and unexpected message of hope.

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New York

PROTOTYPE screens Frost’s The Murder of Halit Yozgat – an opera in quarantine

The storyline The Murder of Halit Yozgat is disturbing but not out of the ordinary. It's subthemes – systemic injustice, racial hatred, abuse of state power and the failure of governments to respond effectively, if at all, to them - however, are terrifying.

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New York

The digital premieres of The Planet – A Lament and Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists from PROTOTYPE

Two more contrasting musical theater works would be hard to imagine than these brilliant offerings from Indonesia and Iceland.

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New York

New York’s PROTOTYPE 2021 – still daring, but now digital

The Prototype Festival has gone digital and global with six fascinating productions that include sonic and in-person experiences, as well as new works from Germany, Iceland and Indonesia.

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Philadelphia

BON APPÉTIT!: A Sweet Soirée – Jamie Barton is as luscious as the chocolate cake she bakes for Opera Philadelphia

Opera Philadelphia presents Lee Hoilby's Bon Appétit! with Jamie Barton. Drawn from two actual episodes of Child's televised cooking show, The French Chef, the one-person opera is simply delicious.

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All of my reviews for Seen and Heard International can be found here

Recordings Reviews

Erato

Rossini - Amici e Rivali

Amici e Rivali finds Lawrence Brownlee and Michael Spyres in excellent form as they face off as friends and rivals in the music of Rossini.

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Rick's Picks

Brooklyn

Brooklyn Art Song Society streams Schubert's Winterreise

Philadelphia

David T. Little's Soldier Songs streaming on the Opera Philadelphia Channel

About

I got the travel bug from my parents. As a boy I had crisscrossed the US with them and my younger brother on the classic American Road Trip to California. At 16, I went to Europe for the first time. The destination was Germany, a country that I have returned to many times. In addition to business and personal travel, I have lived in Switzerland, Singapore and China. So far, it’s been a wonderful life of travelling the world and experiencing its wonders..

A musician for most of my life, first a trumpet player and then a singer, I have a degree in music from the University of Pittsburgh. In 2013, I began reviewing for Seen and Heard International and have posted reviews from the US, Europe and Asia. In addition, I regularly contribute program notes to the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and have had music and travel articles published in the Global Times, Shanghai Daily, MusicWeb International, Broad Street Review and other publications.

Although I am thrilled to have press privileges in many of the world’s great concert halls and opera houses, it is the offerings in the more out-of-the way places that excite me the most. There one still finds great music, often at its national, indigenous best, in theaters, whether ancient or modern, that are as grand and beautiful as any in the world. More importantly, these venues not only preserve the past, they embrace the new, keeping classical music current and vital. That is the world that I invite you to explore with me on my tours.

Articles

Soprano Juliet Petrus in Conversation with Rick Perdian

Juliet Petrus and Katherine Chu's 'Singing in Mandarin: A Guide to Chinese Lyric Diction and Vocal Repertoire' is a portal to a country and its music.

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Soprano Fatma Said in Conversation with Rick Perdian

'El Nour', Egyptian soprano Fatma Said's debut recording on Warner Classics, explores her native country’s culture in music that is as colorful and exotic as the places that inspired it.

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Sarah Kirkland Snider in 2020: Navigating lockdown, releasing a recording and composing an opera

Gallicantus brings virtuosity and purity to Sarah Kirkland Snider's remarkably beautiful 'Mass for the Endangered'.

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