New York Times – Zachary Woolfe (8.Nov. 2015)

“Like many, I’ve walked through Times Square and experienced something I can only properly call despair. But I tip my hat to the lady who was drifting, crouching, shrieking and generally existing just past the verge of a nervous breakdown between 42nd and 43rd Streets on Broadway early Saturday evening. Even at my worst, she had me beat.This was the potent soprano Carole Sidney Louis, singing the nameless, desperate Woman in Arnold Schoenberg’s 1909 monodrama “Erwartung” (“Expectation”). Or, rather, she was singing the nameless, desperate Woman in “Arnold Schönberg’s ‘Erwartung’: A Performance by Robin Rhode,” which is not quite the same thing….”

ARTSY EDITORIAL- BY ALEXANDER FORBES (NOV 10TH, 2015)

“…Billed as a “30-second anxiety attack extended musically into a 30-minute opera” in paraphrasis of its original composer, Arnold Schönberg, Erwartung drew crowds from the art world to an oval stage on Broadway between 42nd and 43rd Streets. It also drew many more uninitiated onlookers to the exterior of the seating area to snap a photo or, in at least the case of one portly man, stand with mouth agape. A reimagining of Schönberg’s 1909 opera by artist Robin Rhode for Performa 15, the piece featured a single soprano (the renowned Carole Sidney Louis, her face painted a stark white) projecting above a sizable orchestra conducted by Maestro Arturo Tamayo. It was the first time an opera had ever been staged in Times Square, a location that updates the backdrop of Schönberg’s original piece…Thus, a redemptive thread runs ever-more-prominently through the performance as Louis’s laments swell, her words increasingly staccato blips of memories racing past so frantically that they are inaccessible to the audience…”