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THE NEW YORK TIMES
2023.04.13, Oussama Zahr (archive)
“Lady M” is Heartbeat at its best. Music director and arranger, Daniel Schlosberg... reoriented the audience’s point of entry into one of Verdi’s most distinctively colored scores, trimming the length, the orchestrations and the list of characters to reveal the work’s core. 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.
2022.02.14, Joshua Barone (archive)
Radically transformed, too, is the score, arranged by Daniel Schlosberg for two pianos, two horns, two cellos and percussion, with the multitasking (and nearly scene-stealing) Schlosberg onstage conducting from the keyboard
2021.09.25, Naveen Kumar (archive)
Nimble arrangements by Nico Muhly and Daniel Schlosberg flit seamlessly from plucked strings to erotic disco beats
2021.05.26, Joshua Barone (archive)
Schlosberg... created Heartbeat’s radical arrangements of classic operas
2019.12.05, Anthony Tommasini (archive)
Heartbeat Opera is far more unusual in its tweaking (and trimming) of librettos and its reorchestration of scores. ...music director Schlosberg has effectively transformed Weber’s colorful score for seven players... transformed the orchestration into a collage of electronic and acoustic sounds, in effect a recomposition... Heartbeat’s production team delved into the work’s disturbing, timely subtexts by streamlining and modernizing it and succeed. By keeping the music in the original language and style, the contrast between American ambience and classic Romanticism made a powerful impact. 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
2019.11.28, Zachary Woolfe (archive)
Intimate, intense and contemporary,... paring [canonical works] down to their concentrated cores and stripping away centuries of expectations and tradition
2018.05.04, Ryan Ebright (archive)
To bring [Fidelio] to life in the era of Black Lives Matter, ...[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
2017.05.24, Anthony Tommasini (archive)
The devotion of [Heartbeat Opera] 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
2017.05.17, Mary von Aue (archive)
In Mr. Schlosberg’s arrangement of the score for an intimate ensemble... the haunting melody of the “humming chorus” gives way to a dream sequence, assembled from scenes of Puccini’s Act I
NEW YORKER
2019.12.02, Oussama Zahr (archive)
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
2018.05.28, Alex Ross (archive)
Schlosberg... has a flair for cutting and repurposing famous operas without mangling them
2017.05.31, Russell Platt (archive)
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
2016.04.04, Alex Ross (archive)
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
NPR: All Things Considered
2022.02.19, Anastasia Tsioulcas (archive)
Schlosberg strips the full orchestra down... The effect is strikingly intimate and imaginative, texturally effective, and also slightly claustrophobia-inducing—not out of place in a prison
AIR MAIL
2022.10.07, Matthew Gurewitsch (archive)
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.
WQXR
2017.05.23, David Patrick Stearns (archive)
If there was a miracle here, it was the orchestral adaptation. ...So smart was the use of the string ensemble in this Daniel Schlosberg adaptation
The WALL STREET JOURNAL
2020.06.23, Heidi Waleson (archive)
Schlosberg’s creepily brilliant musical arrangement
2019.12.09, Heidi Waleson (archive)
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. ...Mr. Schlosberg’s deft arrangement and his fine ensemble, which he led from the keyboard, supplied a lot of entertainment
2017.05.07, Heidi Waleson (archive)
Schlosberg, the company’s co-music director, created ingenious seven-player arrangements of their orchestral scores, including some artful transitions
2016.03.14, Heidi Waleson (archive)
Ingenius rescoring by Schlosberg
2015.04.01, Heidi Waleson (archive)
[Schlosberg’s] witty five-instrument arrangement
THE WASHINGTON POST
2020.05.06, Michael Andor Brodeur (archive)
Broadway World
2019.12.10, Richard Sasanow (archive)
OPERA NEWS
2021.05.29, David Shengold (archive)
SCHMOPERA
2018.10.29, Lara Secord-Haid (archive)
Lithe arrangements by Daniel Schlosberg never overcrowd the tight acoustic confines of Zoom
Broadway World
2019.12.10, Richard Sasanow (archive)
The score was arranged (and conducted) by Daniel Schlosberg, a performance artist in his own right, 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, set in Wolf Canyon: seamlessly, effectively—and terrifyingly—done
OPERA NEWS
2021.05.29, David Shengold (archive)
Schlosberg's rhythmically complicated instrumental music is... compelling and evocative...
SCHMOPERA
2018.10.29, Lara Secord-Haid (archive)
"Feed the Snakes" by Daniel Schlosberg [is]... heartbreakingly lyrical
New York Classical Review
2019.01.05, David Wright (archive)
Schlosberg... brought a marvelous variety of touch and play-anything technique
SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL
2019.01.06, Rick Perdian (archive)
Schlosberg was the superb pianist, capturing the fleeting emotions of the [Ned Rorem’s] songs as deftly as Rosen and performing the dramatic Interlude at the apex of the cycle with virtuosic aplomb
Oregon Arts Watch
2017.08.04, Matthew Andrews (archive)
The extra creepy, cosmic-horrific, mind-breaking Twin Peaks... manifest in ways the original could never quite delve into deeply enough. ...an imaginary episode of Twin Peaks directed by a skilled young composer [Daniel Schlosberg].. everything feels darker, slower, stranger, a little more mysterious and a lot more disturbing