November 5, 2021 In News

Raves for Madame Herz with the Orchestra of the 18th Century

I’ve never been accused of NOT wearing my heart on my sleeve, but goodness gracious, mein Herz did overflow every time I heard the opening bars of Mozart’s sublime “L’amerò, saro costante” last month. That’s an aria from his early opera Il rè pastore, and I recently got to sing it many times on tour with the Orchestra of the 18th Century, along with the short, goofy opera Der Schauspieldirektor. This project was meant to have been a full-scale Zauberflöte (in which I would have been First Lady) but had to be scaled down for Covid reasons. I sang Madame Herz a billion years ago in North Carolina; somehow, improbably, in 2021, after the weirdest and most challenging eighteen months of my adult life, here I was, playing her again on the grandest stages of the Netherlands, having a blast pretending to be an outrageous diva in an outrageous gold gown.READ MORE

April 10, 2020 In Blog

Höchste Lust: music as the opposite of social distancing

it is a necessity to have a plan, a manifesto, an alternative. it’s a question of life and death for our species. as a musician i feel i can suggest the musical poetic angle which is that after tragedies one has to invent a new world, knit it or embroider, make it up. it’s not gonna be given to you because you deserve it, it doesn’t work that way. you have to imagine something that doesn’t exist and dig a cave into the future and demand space. it’s a territorial hope affair. at the time, that digging is utopian but in the future it will become your reality.

—Björk

 

Oh, hi. Weren’t we just chatting? Was it really only last month that I was here on the blog, smugly linking to positive reviews and broadcasts, projects I had in the pipeline? Was it really just a few weeks ago that my first performances were canceled due to the rapid spread of COVID-19 across Europe, and I was hoping (despite more emails and apologies coming in every day) that the loss might be limited to my March and April gigs?

… Well. Here we are, in a different reality. So many people are losing so much, so quickly. I am currently healthy, in a well-functioning country, riding out the uncertainty in a comfortable house with my husband and two close friends (one of whom is a wonderful pianist, so I can even carry on with music at home). I feel fervently grateful for my good luck, and guilty for being so lucky when others aren’t. I don’t know how to be adequately grateful for the doctors and nurses risking themselves every day to care for sick people, or for the public-health folks and epidemiologists who are working to lessen the blow around the world. The scale of it all is staggering.READ MORE