Where is the Nicolai of yesteryear?
I’ve lived long enough now to start seeing a repertory turning point in classical music, and I think the canon of the near future will be different in the kind of lighter music it lets in, among other things.
For instance, when I was younger, I could hear at orchestral or [...]
Entries from July 2009
July 30, 2009
Watching the repertory shift
July 28, 2009
Great art, odious people
Florent Schmitt.
One of the more persistent dilemmas of listening to music, or taking in any art form, is knowing too much unpleasant stuff about its creator.
I was talking to a fellow music critic the other day about a knockout performance he’d just seen of Shostakovich’s Song of the Forests, his 1949 oratorio in which some [...]
July 19, 2009
How about grants to pursue your artistic dream?
The Poor Poet (1839), by Carl Spitzweg.
The White House might disagree that there’s a need for a second stimulus, but at least the Oracle of Omaha agrees with me (and his statement came out a day after my blog entry).
Another thing that occurred to me while considering how a second stimulus would work is something [...]
July 16, 2009
Chamber music lures me to the work table
Doing the composer/journalist/entrepreneur shuffle, as I’m doing these days, is difficult to keep up, in part because I find my allegiances sorely tested.
This past week I did a review of the opening concert in the 18th season of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival, as well as turned in an advancer to The Miami Herald [...]
July 7, 2009
Second stimulus should include arts programs
It seems clear to me that sometime next year, if not sooner, the Congress is going to have to come up with a second massive stimulus plan to re-goose the economy.
The first stimulus was too narrow in its belief that funneling huge amounts of money to the banks would encourage them to lend again, but [...]
July 4, 2009
A playlist for the Fourth
July 3, 2009
One of my favorite blogging things to do for the Fourth is create an all-American playlist that I try to adhere to during the day. While one of our country’s most important exports is our popular music, the United States has a tremendous and marvelous corpus of classical music that rarely gets the [...]
