Posts Tagged

Classical Music

Douglas MercerEssays

Loathsome Leonard by Douglas Mercer SOMETIMES THINGS WORK by inadvertence, and Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, his new much-ballyhooed film biography of Leonard Bernstein, is surely one of them. Meant to be a tribute to a passionate “artist” who nevertheless had a “complicated” private life, to anyone…
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Essays

by Martin Kerr “At age twelve I saw William Tell for the first time, and a few months later, my first opera, Lohengrin. I was captivated at once. My youthful enthusiasm for the Master of Bayreuth knew no bounds.” — Mein Kampf, Volume I, Chapter 1, pp. 16-17 ADOLF HITLER is primarily known for his political…
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Essays

by Paul Comben WE ARE IN the Queen’s Hall, London, on one of the major British concert evenings of 1935. About us, the auditorium is steadily filling with people about to hear the premiere of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Fourth Symphony. Although some news of the work’s content has leaked…
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Classic Essays

HOW TRUE were the accusations made by Richard Wagner in his famous article “Judaism in Music”? Was the theory of disproportionate Jewish influence realistic? Or was it the myth that Jewish apologists would have us believe? Ernest Newman’s four-volume biography of Wagner gives…
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Classic Essays

by Jeff Hilton A READER HAS asked me to recommend a list of recordings of Western music performed by Western musicians. During long and hard cogitation I have made lists of the Ten Greatest Recordings and the Hundred Greatest Recordings, but these lists are too personal and include many recordings that…
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Classic Essays

INTERPRETATION, the element that give a particular flavor to music, can be the difference between a good and a bad performance. When the interpretation is distorted for whatever reason, a wholesale alteration of the composition occurs. There are built-in constraints to distortion in instrumental…
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Essays

by Michael J. Polignano RECENTLY I WENT to the San Francisco Opera’s new production of Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman (Der Fliegende Holländer), and I thought I would share my reactions, since they relate to larger issues. (ILLUSTRATION: Richard Wagner (1813-1883).) It was…
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Classic EssaysVideo

THE DUTCH orchestral conductor Willem Mengelberg (pictured) was born of German parents, March 28, 1871, in Utrecht, The Netherlands. He died March 22, 1951, in Zuort, Switzerland, having lived his last six years in exile in his Swiss summer house. During his concert life he trained two orchestras,…
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Essays

The great conductor is one of those few men of whom it is only necessary to mention a single name — Karajan — and all people of our culture will know of whom you speak. by Mike Walsh HERBERT VON KARAJAN’s (pictured) enthusiasm for National Socialism never troubled him. He wouldn’t ever discuss…
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News

A UKRAINIAN-BORN pianist was barred from playing at Canada’s Toronto Symphony Orchestra (TSO) for expressing views on the situation in Ukraine via Twitter, according to the soloist herself. The move led to a social media storm tagged #LetValentinaPlay. The orchestra has officially announced…
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