Category Archives: The Gospel of the Kingdom

GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY: A HYMN TO THE HUMAN SOUL

Conor McPherson, the world’s greatest English-language playwright asked Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan  if he would be interested in using his songs in a theater piece. The result is the magnificent folk-opera Girl from the North Country, which we saw in October 0f 2018 at New York’s Public Theatre. Since then, director McPherson has been […]

LYRIC OPERA’S CINDERELLA: A RED-BLOODED BEL CANTO VALENTINE

Gioachino Rossini (1792-18868) was but 24 years old when he wrote his world-famous opera The Barber of Seville. The following year he wrote Cinderella (Cenerentola), which was more popular than his Barber for many years. After composing forty operas, he retired at age 46, never to write another opera. The Cinderella (Cerenterola) (1817) by Rossini […]

BEETHOVEN, MUTI, AND THE GLORY OF GOD

For his final concert as Musical Director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Riccardo Muti chose Beethovan’s Missa Solemnis. He has compared  Beethoven’s Missa solemnis to “climbing Mount Everest. It is the greatest religious sermon in music. It is the Sistine Chapel of music — a work so complex that it makes every interpreter’s wrists tremble.” The Missa […]

MERCURY THEATER CHICAGO FINDS GOLD IN BIG RIVER

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” Those seven words from chapter 31 of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are among the most memorable in American literature. At this point in the novel, Huck Finn has just realized the con artists, the  Duke and Dauphin, have betrayed the runaway slave Jim and sold […]

Handel’s JEPHTHA: Being Right in One’s Own Eyes: The Music of the Baroque’s Electrifying Performance

The most commonly used word to describe Georg Friedrich Handel’s 1752 oratorio Jephtha is “dark”. And the word has nothing to do with the fact that the composer was going blind as he was composing. Jephtha, Handel’s last oratorio, is his most troubling masterpiece. The work contemplates the often inscrutable role of the divine in […]