The relative paucity of post-1930 canonized symphonic repertoire impels the question: who else is awaiting such discovery? The surest...

In my case, the discovery came in 1987, with Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New...

“Good Night” received its first performance since 1898 a few weeks ago as part of “Scenes from Childhood,” a concert presented by...

Writing the script for the core symphonic program, I hit upon the idea of juxtaposing Shostakovich’s dissident memoirs, from the 1970s,...

A few months ago Jim Svejda of LA’s KUSC, whose The Record Shelf has for years invaluably showcased necessary recordings from before the...

Reviewing the new book The Leonard Bernstein Letters in last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, I write: In June 2011, the estate of Leonard...

Last Fall, I was interviewed for a full hour by Chris Johnson of Houston Public Radio and invited to comment not only on my book Moral...

“Where did the big set pieces of Porgy and Bess originate? With Rouben Mamoulian, it seems,” writes Steven Suskin in his copious...

“Bring my goat!” Porgy exclaims in the final scene of Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess. Bess has left for New York City and he’s...

Tom Huizenga, who presides over Classical Music for National Public Radio, recently initiated a discussion thread on “The Great American...

To my ears, the most sublime music Igor Stravinsky ever composed is “The Land of Eternal Dwelling” — the Epilogue to The Fairy’s Kiss....

The current issue of the Times Literary Supplement (UK) includes my review of the City Opera season just past, as follows: Now is a tough...

Leonard Bernstein did Charles Ives an incomparable service when in the 1950s he premiered and recorded Ives’s Second Symphony. But...

Silvestre Revueltas’s Redes is one of the greatest of all film scores. That it remains virtually unknown is a function of Revueltas’s own...

Two wicked questions to ask conductors of Dvorak’s New World Symphony are: “Why does the coda begin with a dirge?” and “Why is there a...

The current Times Literary Supplement UK), not available online, includes my review of the Met’s exceptional new Parsifal, as follows: In...

Readers of this blog in the New York vicinity will (I hope) be interested to know that I’m producing a take-no-prisoners concert event –...

PostClassical Ensemble’s month-long “Interpreting Shostakovich” festival, in DC, began with a screening of Grigori Kozintsev’s 1970 film...

As readers of this blog know, I am the author of a recently published book titled “Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America’s...

My topic has ever been cultural transplantation – the fate of classical music when exported from Europe to America. Of the composers...