Thursday, September 18, 7pm - 8:30pm EST

GUEST SPEAKER SERIES
WEBINAR
Members - FREE
Non-Members - $35

Join former Washington Post chief classical music critic Anne Midgette and Composer, Music Critic and Professor Greg Sandow for a lively conversation about the myth of “park and bark.” In the 21st century, audiences have been led to believe that we’ve seen a renaissance of acting in opera, and that singers of the past tended to stand still on stage and simply power out their music: the so-called “park and bark.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Midgette and Sandow offer a look at the true history of “singing actors,” acting singers, and how opera singers have long moved people with their acting through their bodies as well as their voices. 

This discussion will take place over Zoom. Participants are invited to send questions in before to be considered for discussion during the live conversation.

After our guest discussion, attendees will be invited to Zoom break out sessions to debate among themselves. Midgette and Sandow will drop into each room for interaction with the attendees.

Meet Our GUEST SPEAKERS

Anne Midgette was the classical music critic of The Washington Post for 12 years, from 2008 through 2019. Before that, she was for seven years a regular contributor of classical music and theater reviews to The New York Times. She has also written about music, the visual arts, dance, theater and film for The Wall Street Journal, Opera News, The Los Angeles Times, Town & Country, and many other publications, reviewing and interviewing everyone from Spike Lee through Marina Abramovic to Luciano Pavarotti. At the Post, she oversaw every aspect of classical music coverage, offset her music writing with occasional visual art reviews, expanded the reach of the beat on social media as The Classical Beat, and ultimately became known for her work on #MeToo in classical music, an issue on which she has continued to focus. 

A graduate of Yale University, where she majored in Classical Civilization, she lived in Germany for 11 years, writing for a range of publications about music, the visual arts, theater, dance and film; editing a monthly magazine; working as a translator; and writing several travel guidebooks. 

She is co-author of The King and I, a candid and controversial book written with Luciano Pavarotti’s former manager, Herbert Breslin, about his 36 years working with the temperamental tenor (Doubleday, 2004); and of My Nine Lives, the memoir of the pianist Leon Fleisher, who reinvented himself after losing the use of two fingers on his right hand, only to regain their use some 30 years later (Doubleday, 2010). She is currently working on a historical novel about the woman who built pianos for Beethoven. 

Greg Sandow grew up in New York, fell in love with opera when he was nine, and with rock & roll at 11. Studied singing in high school and college, thought he’d be a singer, but switched to composing, and got a master’s degree in composition from the Yale School of Music. Also sang opera there, undeterred by reviews that said his strength was his acting. His biggest role was Alberich, in a concert performance of Das Rheingold. 

In his professional life, he’s been a critic, one of the few with a national reputation in both classical music and pop. He’s also taught graduate courses at Juilliard, at the Eastman School of Music, and at the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins. 

One of his courses has been on classical music’s future; the other has been on how to speak and write about music. The future of classical music became his specialty, something he wrote about, spoke about in the US and abroad, and worked on as a consultant, among other things doing projects with major symphony orchestras. 

This past spring, he came to a turning point. While doing other things, his composing interest has ebbed and flowed, bringing success whenever he’s focused on it. But this year he produced a concert and recording of his three string quartets, a project that brought him such happiness that he thought composing from now on should be his focus, along with writing on subjects he cares most deeply about. 

And so he stopped teaching, with some regret, since he’s loved working with his students. But it was time. He’s composing a string trio, for performances in Philadelphia and London this fall, and the subjects he’ll write about are, as before, the future of classical music, but also bel canto opera, one of his great musical loves.

Classical music has a difficult future, he thinks, because it’s grown distant from our culture, and interest in it has fallen sharply. It needs to reinvent itself, reconnect with the wider world, and restore the creativity and freedom musicians had in past centuries. 

Could bel canto opera help with this? Singers in that era reinvented the music they sang, improvising changes to make it fit their voices and their feeling for the drama. Bringing that back might give classical music a shot of adrenaline, and make it newly alive.