ingenious arrangement... not to mention [Schlosberg’s] expert playing on piano
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
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.
Highbow and Brilliant: the genuinely scary twist in Montag at Soho Rep
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
Schlosberg strips the full orchestra down... the effect is strikingly intimate and imaginative, texturally effective, and also slightly claustrophobia-inducing
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
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.
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
Schlosberg's rhythmically complicated instrumental music is... compelling and evocative
Nimble arrangements by Nico Muhly and Daniel Schlosberg flit seamlessly from plucked strings to erotic disco beats
Schlosberg’s creepily brilliant musical arrangement
Highbow and Brilliant: Heartbeat Opera’s deconstructed online staging of Verdi’s Macbeth, Lady M
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
Intimate, intense and contemporary... rearranging canonical works musically and paring them down to their concentrated cores and stripping away centuries of expectations and tradition
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
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
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
Schlosberg... brought a marvelous variety of touch and play-anything technique
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
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
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
Highbow and Brilliant: Heartbeat Opera transposes Beethoven’s prison opera Fidelio to the Black Lives Matter era
Feed the Snakes by Daniel Schlosberg [is] heartbreakingly lyrical
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
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
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
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
Radical transformational... ingenious rescoring by Schlosberg
witty arrangement by Schlosberg