Peter Dobrin

Peter Dobrin is a classical music critic for The Inquirer. Since 1989, he has written music reviews, features, news and commentary for the paper, covering such topics as the Philadelphia Orchestra's 64-day strike in 1996, the development of a new performing arts center in Philadelphia, changes in the classical-recording industry and the finances of Philadelphia's arts organizations.

He has also covered the Philadelphia Orchestra's tours in Asia, South America and the United States. Dobrin was a French horn player. He earned an undergraduate degree in performance from the University of Miami, and received a master's degree in music criticism from the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, where he studied with Elliott Galkin. His work has also appeared in the Baltimore Sun and the Washington Post.

Read his blog "ArtsWatch" to find out who's making news, noise and splash in the Philadelphia arts world and beyond.

Read Peter's blog Arts Watch
Latest post: Curtis Orchestra Concert Is On - 02/07/2010
Email Peter at pdobrin@phillynews.com

The opening production on the Opera Company of Philadelphia´s 2010-11 schedule is Giuseppe Verdi´s "Otello." Tenor Clifton Forbis (below) will repeat the title role he has performed at La Scala and Vienna State Opera, sharing the part with Arnold Rawls.

Hitting high notes

The Opera Company of Philadelphia is bouncing back from its blues. Ticket sales are growing, fund-raising is progressing, and ambitious new programming is in the works.

By Peter Dobrin, Inquirer Music Critic

Posted 02/05/2010

Were it the plot of an opera-within-an-opera, it might seem a little too pat: Plucky troupe struggles in the shadow of the biggest opera company in the world. Faced with the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression, the company slims down, laying off staff and cutting the budget.

Curtis Orchestra Concert Is On

Maestro mines players' trust - 01/30/2010: By Peter Dobrin, Inquirer Music Critic

In an era that seems to confuse balletics and bouncing locks with conducting skills, you might not pick out Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos as the podium presence most likely to set an audience on fire.
Orchestra hooks up with online distributor - 01/28/2010: Goal is release of 10 live recordings a year.

By Peter Dobrin, Inquirer Music Critic

The Philadelphia Orchestra has struck a deal with an online music distributor to bring its live recordings to iTunes, Amazon.com, and other heavily visited retail sites for download.
Soprano Karita Mattila with Phila. Orchestra - 01/16/2010: By Peter Dobrin, Inquirer Music Critic

Richard Strauss penned dozens of orchestral songs, but somehow the Philadelphia Orchestra keeps coming back to that dearly held group known as the Four Last Songs. Most recently, the big gust of Alessandra Marc and the honest voices of Barbara Hendricks and Pamela Coburn have taken on these autumnal, tenderly transcendent settings of poems by Hermann Hesse and Joseph von Eichendorff.
'ArtsWatch' - 01/15/2010: Inquirer critic and culture writer Peter Dobrin tells you about the Philadelphia arts world and beyond at www.philly.com/philly/blogs/artswatch
As soloist too, Morales makes it count - 01/09/2010: By Peter Dobrin, Inquirer Music Critic

It's startling to realize how much a single orchestral player can lift up everything going on around him or her, and no arrival has been better for the ensemble health of the Philadelphia Orchestra than that, in 2003, of Ricardo Morales. The principal clarinetist, in fact, may represent the most salutary personnel event of the orchestra's last decade.
'ArtsWatch' - 01/08/2010: Inquirer critic and culture writer Peter Dobrin tells you who's making news, noise and splash in the Philadelphia arts world and beyond at www.philly.com/philly/blogs/artswatch
Singer's sonic purity, orchestra's lushness - 01/02/2010: By Peter Dobrin, Inquirer Music Critic

You can keep those waltzes and polkas. This New Year's Eve, the Philadelphia Orchestra imported Audra McDonald. In their annual glamour grab, a lot of American orchestras have appropriated Vienna for this night. Passing the last few hours of the year with Strauss and Straus has its old-country pleasures, though like a lot of folk music, doing it right is trickier than it sounds. It's really a kind of swing, and it doesn't belong to us.
An anemic Pennsylvania Ballet 'Nutcracker' - 12/21/2009: By Peter Dobrin, Inquirer Music Critic

After beating the last notes of The Nutcracker on Friday night, Pennsylvania Ballet music director Beatrice Jona Affron got up on stage to take a bow with the dancers, gestured to the orchestra pit, and directed applause to the musicians. But many were already packing up, and few, if any, looked up to acknowledge what everyone else in the room seemed to know: that Tchaikovsky's score is perhaps this work's primary source of magic.
'ArtsWatch' - 12/18/2009: Inquirer critic and culture writer Peter Dobrin tells you who's making news, noise, and splash in the Philadelphia arts world and beyond at www.philly.com/philly/blogs/
The Mendelssohn's glowing goodbye - 12/04/2009: By Peter Dobrin, Inquirer Music Critic

Nothing in music is more doleful than an aged string quartet whose sense of ensemble is in tatters and whose individual members have grown bored with the sounds of their own voices. Except perhaps a quartet cutting out in its prime.