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
Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh & Falling Water (October 2020)
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)
Philadelphia
Philadelphia - Art, Music & Film (January 2021)
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)
Reviews
London
Epic, powerful, timely – National Theatre at Home’s Small Island
The National Theatre at Home’s Small Island adaptation of Andrea Levy’s 2004 prize-winning book is a story of war, dreams, humanity and that tricky issue of race that is upending much of the developed world at the moment.
Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh Opera celebrates General Director Christopher Hahn’s 20 years with the company with a digital Mask-erade
Pittsburgh Opera's Maecenas XXXVI – Mask-erade is a celebration of the company's history and hope for the future.
Philadelphia
Opera Philadelphia’s Digital Festival O concludes with Breaking the Waves
Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek’s award-winning opera kept me glued to my iPad.
Philadelphia
Opera Philadelphia’s Digital Festival O Presents We Shall Not Be Moved
Directed and choreographed by Bill T. Jones, winner of a MacArthur 'Genius' Award, We Shall Not Be Moved is a powerful piece of musical theater examing race and inequality.
Miskolc, Hungary
An opera for this time and place – Raymond J. Lustig’s Semmelweis
A music-theater work inspired by Ignác Semmelweis, the 19th-century Hungarian physician known as the pioneer of handwashing and antiseptic procedures.
Philadelphia
Opera Philadelphia announces Digital Festival O
Opera Philadelphia launches Digital Festival O. Throughout May, one of the US's most exciting and innovative opera companies will stream five productions of operas from prior seasons, as well as Rossini's The Barber of Seville.
All of my reviews for Seen and Heard International can be found here
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.
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