Dan Schlosberg





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The New York Times, 2024
📣 Oussama Zahr on Heartbeat Opera’s Eugene Onegin (2024):
beyond the ripped-from-the-headlines concepts stands the wizard of [Heartbeat Opera’s] operation: the music director and arranger Dan Schlosberg, whose imaginative chamber orchestrations have the capacity to reinvent opera’s most beloved scores... you will want to hear what kind of ingenuity Schlosberg applies to the score


Western Australia Today, 2023
📣  Bridget Davies on Maria Callas: A Concert in Hologram (2023):
Led by conductor Daniel Schlosberg, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra [is] the real deal


Parterre Box, 2023
📣 Max Keller on Heartbeat Opera’s The Golden Cock (2023):
ingenious arrangement... not to mention [Schlosberg’s] expert playing on piano


Opera News, 2023
📣 Joanne Sydney Lessner on Heartbeat Opera’s Tosca (2023):
seamlessly tailored 100-minute adaptation stripped the work to its essence, exposing a story that, shorn of its Italianate excesses, is relatable and shockingly violent... this immersive art-imitates-life-imitates-art framing device sent the dramatic stakes through the roof. Schlosberg’s evocative orchestral reduction featured three cellos—no violins—plus flute, horn, piano, bass and a particularly expressive muted trumpet


The New York Times, 2023
📣 Oussama Zahr on Heartbeat Opera’s Lady M (2023):
Schlosberg, with the vision of a master sculptor, chipped away at Verdi’s score to reveal new contours and continuities in the music and action. He didn’t so much reduce Verdi’s orchestration as reinvent it for an ensemble of six musicians (including himself as conductor and pianist). They played like a band possessed, and the use of electronics added an otherworldly texture bubbling with disruption. It was flat-out brilliant.


New York Magazine, 2022
📣 Approval Matrix on Montag (2022):
Highbow and Brilliant: the genuinely scary twist in Montag at Soho Rep


The New York Times, 2022
📣 Joshua Barone on Heartbeat Opera’s Fidelio (2018):
Radically transformed, too, is the score, arranged by Schlosberg for two pianos, two horns, two cellos and percussion, with the multitasking (and nearly scene-stealing) Schlosberg onstage conducting from the keyboard

NPR: All Things Considered, 2022
📣 Anastasia Tsioulcas on Heartbeat Opera’s Fidelio (2018):
Schlosberg strips the full orchestra down... the effect is strikingly intimate and imaginative, texturally effective, and also slightly claustrophobia-inducing

SF Chronicle, 2022
📣 Joshua Kosman on Heartbeat Opera’s Fidelio (2018):
Schlosberg’s musical arrangement for just seven instruments is a small miracle of both reduction and rethinking. Schlosberg [uses] that structure as a pliable framework to situate the work in the here and now

Airmail, 2022
📣 Matthew Gurewitsch on Heartbeat Opera’s Fidelio (2018):
Radical, from a musical point of view, is Schlosberg’s reduction of Beethoven’s symphonic orchestra... Schlosberg’s singular combo manages to hint at the subtexts Beethoven conveys with his infinitely broader instrumental palette... there’s wizardry in that.


Seen and Heard International, 2022
📣 Rick Perdian on Schlosberg’s performance on Frederick R. Koch Arts Foundation’s Townhouse Series (2022):
To paraphrase [Anthony Roth] Costanzo, there aren’t many pianists who can play both Liszt and Gershwin to perfection. Of course, Brahms, Debussy, Poulenc, Rachmaninoff and others have to be added to the list


Opera News, 2021
📣 David Shengold on Schlosberg’s The Extinctionist (2021):
Schlosberg's rhythmically complicated instrumental music is... compelling and evocative


The New York Times, 2021
📣 Naveen Kumar on Only an Octave Apart (2021):
Nimble arrangements by Nico Muhly and Daniel Schlosberg flit seamlessly from plucked strings to erotic disco beats


Wall Street Journal, 2020
📣 Heidi Waleson on Heartbeat Opera’s Lady M, an online fantasia (2020):
Schlosberg’s creepily brilliant musical arrangement


New York Magazine, 2020
📣 Approval Matrix on Heartbeat Opera’s Lady M, an online fantasia (2020):
Highbow and Brilliant: Heartbeat Opera’s deconstructed online staging of Verdi’s Macbeth, Lady M



The New York Times, 2019
📣 Anthony Tommasini on Heartbeat Opera’s Der Freischütz (2019):
Music director Schlosberg has effectively transformed Weber’s colorful score for seven players, into a collage of electronic and acoustic sounds, in effect a recomposition... Here was a rare presentation of the work that would define 19th-century German opera, made topical in a way that both respected Weber and stretched him


The New York Times, 2019
📣 Zachary Woolfe on Heartbeat Opera’s Der Freischütz (2019):
Intimate, intense and contemporary... rearranging canonical works musically and paring them down to their concentrated cores and stripping away centuries of expectations and tradition


New Yorker, 2019
📣 Oussama Zahr on Heartbeat Opera’s Der Freischütz (2019):
Heartbeat’s secret weapon... may well be the chamber orchestrations of its efficient co-music director and arranger Daniel Schlosberg, who leads members of Cantata Profana and an alternating cast of singers in Weber’s moody score


Wall Street Journal, 2019
📣 Heidi Waleson on Heartbeat Opera’s Der Freischütz (2019):
The show’s most inventive elements are musical: Daniel Schlosberg’s lively arrangement for seven instrumentalists (most of whom double or triple), and the recomposition of the supernatural Wolf Canyon scene, for which Mr. Schlosberg and William Gardiner devised a creepy electronic soundscape of noises and wails that would do nicely for a horror movie. ...Schlosberg’s deft arrangement and his fine ensemble, which he led from the keyboard, supplied a lot of entertainment


Broadway World, 2019
📣 Richard Sasanow on Heartbeat Opera’s Der Freischütz (2019):
The score was arranged (and conducted) by Daniel Schlosberg for a handful of instrumentalists and electronics, with some of the most imaginative doubling you'll ever hear from the pit band at an opera. Schlosberg and William Gardiner recomposed what is probably the opera's most notable scene seamlessly, effectively—and terrifyingly—done


New York Classical Review, 2019
📣 David Wright on Schlosberg’s performance of Ned Rorem’s Poems of Love and the Rain:
Schlosberg... brought a marvelous variety of touch and play-anything technique


Seen and Heard International, 2019
📣 Rick Perdian on Schlosberg’s performance of Ned Rorem’s Poems of Love and the Rain:
Schlosberg was superb, capturing the fleeting emotions of the [Ned Rorem’s] songs deftly and performing the dramatic Interlude at the apex of the cycle with virtuosic aplomb


New Yorker, 2018
📣 Alex Ross on Heartbeat Opera’s Fidelio (2018):
I saw “Fidelio,” and was blindsided by its impact. The composer-pianist Daniel Schlosberg has a flair for cutting and repurposing famous operas without mangling them


The New York Times, 2018
📣 Ryan Ebright on Heartbeat Opera’s Fidelio (2018):
To bring [Fidelio] to life in the era of Black Lives Matter, [director Ethan] Heard and Schlosberg are setting their production within today’s American criminal justice system. Schlosberg has arranged Beethoven’s score... to emphasize musically the opera’s story of heroism amid darkness


New York Magazine, 2018
📣 Approval Matrix on Heartbeat Opera’s Fidelio (2018):
Highbow and Brilliant: Heartbeat Opera transposes Beethoven’s prison opera Fidelio to the Black Lives Matter era



Schmopera, 2018
📣 Lara Secord-Haid on Schlosberg’s Feed the Snakes (2018):
Feed the Snakes by Daniel Schlosberg [is] heartbreakingly lyrical


The New York Times, 2017
📣 Anthony Tommasini on Heartbeat Opera’s Carmen (2017) and Butterfly (2017):
The devotion to Puccini’s music was evident in the sensitive arrangement of the score (by the co-music director Daniel Schlosberg), richly detailed yet delicate... I found the jazz-infused arrangement very insightful into the colorings and seductive allure of Bizet’s score. [Schlosberg] also played a mean accordion


New Yorker, 2017
📣 Russell Platt on Heartbeat Opera’s Butterfly (2017):
What’s so pleasing about Heartbeat Opera’s Butterfly is how well its artistic intentions dovetail with its limited means. The orchestra is cut down to an arrangement (by the composer Daniel Schlosberg) for harp and string quintet that recalls the mellifluous elegance of the original


Oregon ArtsWatch, 2017
📣 Matthew Andrews on Schlosberg’s A Twin Peaks Fantasy (2017):
Schlosberg’s score turns deftly from bittersweet to sickly sweet and back again, from innocent to troubled to dangerous to dead in just a few measures. Extra creepy, cosmic-horrific, mind-breaking... manifests in ways the original could never quite delve into deeply enough. We got an imaginary episode of Twin Peaks directed by a skilled young composer, everything feels darker, slower, stranger, a little more mysterious and a lot more disturbing


New Yorker, 2016
📣 Alex Ross on Heartbeat Opera’s Lucia di Lammermoor (2016):
Schlosberg’s scoring—whistling tones of bowed vibraphone and cymbals, the harplike sound of strummed piano strings, the slide of a shot glass on an electric guitar—put a modernist frame around the action, although the substance of Donizetti’s score came through


Wall Street Journal, 2016
📣 Heidi Waleson on Heartbeat Opera’s Lucia di Lammermoor (2016):

Radical transformational... ingenious rescoring by Schlosberg


Oregon ArtsWatch, 2015
📣
Tristan Bliss on Schlosberg’s Two Remarks (2015):
Schlosberg... composed pandemonium and quiescence intoxicated by life. Opening with an eclectic ragtime meets Dixieland Buster Keaton-esque free-for-all where the intentionality of everything is questionable, Schlosberg dissolved our emotional defenses with laughter and took them captive. Two Remarks... made me feel alive


Wall Street Journal, 2015
📣 Heidi Waleson on Heartbeat Opera’s Daphnis & Chloé (2015):

witty arrangement by Schlosberg

©2024 Dan Schlosberg