Earlier this month, the New Yorker previewed an excerpt from Hallelujah Junction, the forthcoming memoir by the American composer John Adams. The book, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is scheduled for release Sept. 30.
As it happens, I’ve read the galleys of the book (twice), and though I’ll try to refrain from quoting [...]
A brief entry today to second the words of Amanda Ameer, whose Life’s a Pitch blog can be found on ArtsJournal.com, which I now realize I have neglected to add to my blogroll until now.
In this piece, Ameer cheers a New York Times effort to review two perfomances by the Emerson String Quartet, one at [...]
On this day 50 years ago the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams died, ending a creative career that had lasted more than 60 years, and is to my mind the single greatest body of work by any English composer.
I admire Britten, Elgar and Holst, Purcell, Tallis and Byrd, but Vaughan Williams seems to me more [...]
There aren’t many recordings of the Violin Concerto of Arnold Schoenberg — Zvi Zeitlin and Pierre Amoyal have done it — so the disc of the concerto released this spring by the American violinist Hilary Hahn with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra is something of a major event.
And with good reason: [...]
Here’s something from Britain’s Telegraph that was great fun to read (and watch, too): A survey asking some well-known literary types what canonical work of literature they hadn’t read, and were ashamed to admit it.
The video for this thing is fun, with people such as Simon Sebag Montefiore, celebrated for his books about Stalin, admitting [...]
I’m not sure how long the phenomenon of elaborate tribute-band concerts has been going on, but right now in this area you can hear live renditions of seminal 1960s and 1970s albums such as Led Zeppelin IV, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Abbey Road, and later this coming season a Pink Floyd tribute [...]
Listening this week to the new discs of the short-lived American pianist William Kapell, taken from broadcasts over the air in 1953 as he toured Australia. He was killed that October when his plane coming back from Down Under slammed into a mountain near San Francisco.
He was just 31 years old, and on the [...]
A friend writes this week that certain kinds of weather seem more conducive to creativity than others, and with Tropical Storm Fay having moved through here with plenty of wind and rain in the past days, there was plenty of weather to choose from if you wanted.
But I know what she was getting at, and [...]
In writing The Soloist, the Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez has achieved the kind of useful act he writes about wanting and not finding in three decades of newspaper work:
After 30 years of fulminating about this or that, always from a safe distance and usually to no avail, I want something more, even if [...]
The New York Times‘ Arts and Leisure section had an interesting piece on Puccini yesterday, bringing all of us up to date on a current scandal involving this composer, whose 150th birthday is being observed this year. Apparently, he might have had another love child than the boy he fathered with Elvira, the married woman [...]
