I boldly inflicted both reading and writing assignments. The class was large (it was in fact required) – more than 50 instrumentalists....

Harvey had just read my notorious Jeremiad Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New...

It seems to me pretty obvious that nowadays it’s far easier to stage a successful Hamlet or Three Sisters than a successful Aida or...

This weekend’s “Wall Street Journal” includes my review of Conrad L. Osborne’s new mega-book “Opera as Opera” — the most important...

The Bernstein Centenary celebration at the Brevard Music Festival last month was multi-faceted. I was invited to explore the Bernstein...

Museums curate the past. They help us to shape and populate our impressions of history. Orchestras do not curate the past. A typical...

I am returning to the topic of Furtwangler because my previous blog produced a minor miracle – a thread of responses that yielded...

This weekend’s Wall Street Journal includes my review of Roger Allen’s “Wilhelm Furtwangler: Art and the Politics of the Unpolitical.” As...

As I’ve had occasion to observe in my various George Gershwin blogs, Gershwin and J. S. Bach are the two composers most malleable in...

Readers of this blog may remember my last filing from El Paso – a “Kurt Weill’s America” festival, part of the NEH-supported “Music...

Today’s “Wall Street Journal” includes my mini-review of a remarkable film. It’s appended, along with a chunk of my book-in-progress...

Design Credit: Mimi McNamara “It is difficult to detect any significant difference between one piece and another. Nor is there any relief...

As readers of this blog know, Revueltas is the composer most championed by my PostClassical Ensemble in DC. He’s also the main topic of...

My 5,000-word piece on the Leonard Bernstein Centenary, in The Weekly Standard this week, begins with a story you’ve never heard before:...

“Wherever I found decency and humanity in the world, it reminded me of America.” Kurt Weill wrote those words after returning from a...

The champion retarder is Willem Mengelberg, in a famous 1939 recording with his Concertgebouw Orchestra. It sounds like this. Since this...

David Skinner, in his article in the current Humanities Magazine about the NEH-funded Music Unwound consortium that I direct, describes...

Every aspect of this astonishing movie has surged in my comprehension and estimation – to the point, for instance, that I have no doubt...

The profound Russianness of the Kozintsev/Shostakovich Lear transcends language. Re-encountering this great film in the context of...

My own impressions of Weinberg’s music have been spotty and confused, the peak experience having been Ben Capps performing Weinberg’s...