EL PAÍS

Marina Abramović, artist: ‘Now that I can afford to have bad reviews, I can’t find any’

Benjamín G. Rosado — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 17:23:20 +0000

Along her journey to the origins of her own world — to the rural Yugoslavia she knew as a child — Marina Abramović, 79, has paid homage to the French painter Gustave Courbet: in the fourth scene of Balkan Erotic Epic, several women show their vaginas to the audience.

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A lost recording of a Pavarotti concert in a Welsh village is released

Benjamín G. Rosado — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 12:58:15 +0000

Luciano Pavarotti was born in Modena in 1935, but he had his first taste of success far from Italy — specifically in Llangollen, a picturesque village in the west of Wales that still has an active steam train line. Pavarotti traveled to the village in July 1955 to participate in the Eisteddfod Men’s Choir Competition. He was 19 at the time and a member of the Società Corale Gioachino Rossini of Modena, an amateur choir made up of workers from a car factory, office workers, students and his father, Fernando, a baker and also an amateur tenor. “Dad, it’s impossible to sing better than we have,” he told Fernando after performing Jacobus Handl’s In Nomine Jesu that earned them a gold medal. It was so hot in the marquee where the final was held that, when the jury’s decision was announced, the choir’s conductor fainted on stage.

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Georg Friedrich Haas, composer: ‘It is better to be a pervert than a murderer’

Benjamín G. Rosado — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 16:48:00 +0000

A recent photo of Georg Friedrich Haas, 72, at a well-known flamenco tablao in central Madrid has been circulating on Facebook. “I’m not exaggerating when I say it was one of my deepest musical experiences in my whole life,” the Austrian composer admits in a windowless room at the National Auditorium in Madrid. “It struck me that this expressive freedom didn’t belong to any ideology or Central European canon.”

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Meredith Monk, the voice as a spark of a sonic revolution

Benjamín G. Rosado — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 15:10:12 +0000

In 1974, Meredith Monk, 82, moved into a fifth-floor apartment in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood. “Back then, this beautiful loft you see was nothing more than a dusty, broken-down warehouse full of rats,” says the American singer, post-minimalist composer, and performer, as she turns her computer screen to show a large, uncluttered living room that still preserves the original floorboards (“indestructible wood,” she says proudly) from the old textile factories of lower Manhattan. “When I moved in, there was just a toilet and a sink — that was all we artists who were just starting out could afford.”

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Melania Trump takes on Putin in London opera

Benjamín G. Rosado — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 17:12:50 +0000

On the eve of Donald Trump’s first inauguration, Melinda Hughes was performing at the Met Room in New York. “The air in the room was heavy; you could feel the tension,” recalls the London soprano. “The next day, I joined the Women’s March through the city streets while the #FreeMelania meme was circulating online.”

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A piano that survived Hiroshima commemorates the victims of Nagasaki

Benjamín G. Rosado — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 10:31:06 +0000

What struck him most about Japan was the audience’s listening skills. “Even when I played in a restaurant, people maintained an attitude of absolute respect for the music,” says Jacob Koller, 45, from his home in Kofu, Yamanashi Prefecture.

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The palace in an Italian village where two retired US sopranos ‘repair’ broken opera voices

Benjamín G. Rosado — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 10:54:22 +0000

They met in the early 1970s at Indiana University. Sitting on the floor, Lisa Paglin was reviewing some sheet music for her piano class. “Marianna, already a great opera singer fresh from New York, wrapped in an elegant coat and high heels, approached me to ask about Margaret Harshaw’s classroom,” recalls the retired soprano and co-founder of the New Voice Studio. After that first meeting, they never lost touch. “Lisa became a star at the Vienna State Opera,” Marianna Brilla recounts over the phone. “But, like me, she began to feel that something in her technique wasn’t working, that her voice wasn’t responding as it should.”

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An evening with Max Richter, the composer whose music for the edge of sleep has millions of streams

Benjamín G. Rosado — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 10:57:51 +0000

Next to the window of Max Richter’s studio, a telescope points at the bright sky. It’s 3 p.m., but for the German-British composer, it feels like dawn. “I’ve been adjusting my biological clock to the schedule of my upcoming concerts for days,” he says via video conference from the top floor of his house in Oxfordshire. “These controlled jet lag sessions will allow me to come onto the stage refreshed.”

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