The Marriage of Figaro debuted in Vienna in 1786. The audience was so enthusiastic that, after just two performances, Emperor Joseph II ordered posters put up in the theater warning the public against too many encores, “to prevent the excessive duration of operas.” Mozart directed a second…
Of the generation of pianists who became well-known in the 1970s, famous in the '80s and great in the '90s, Murray Perahia and Maurizio Pollini are the remaining twin pillars. On the weekend of May 20, both of them were in Manhattan, at Carnegie Hall, playing exceptional programs to packed houses.
Two musical forms dominated Beethoven's mind and rounded every chapter of his life: the piano sonata was his vanguard. The string quartet was the ultimate expression. Beethoven's five late quartets, the last works he wrote, represent more than his total subjugation of the most difficult frontier he…
Last week, the New York Philharmonic presented Beethoven's Second Piano Concerto as part of a wide-ranging program under visiting Belfast-born conductor Courtney Lewis and pianist Jonathan Biss.
When the curtain rose on the second act of the Met's new production of Richard Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier, the audience applauded and cheered for the set. Represented onstage was the circa-1910 palace of a nouveau-riche arms merchant, complete with two giant mortars on wheels, a dozen Josef…
Fidelio was the first opera performed after the Second World War in Berlin and Vienna respectively. It was chosen to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was also the first opera Toscanini broadcast with the NBC Symphony. The Met has been producing it since…
Not long ago I visited a friend who'd moved to Silicon Valley to work in the startup industry. He had undergone a baffling change: The formerly sports-jacketed East Coaster had become a gluten-free, paleo-dieting, T-shirt-wearing Burning Man.
Not long ago I visited a friend who’d moved to Silicon Valley to work in the startup industry. He had undergone a baffling change: The formerly sports-jacketed East Coaster had become a gluten-free, paleo-dieting, T-shirt-wearing Burning Man.
Idomeneo is the earliest of Mozart's major operas and, traditionally, the least popular. It opened in Munich in 1781, a year before the Vienna debut of The Abduction from the Seraglio, which was a smash-hit. In Munich, a press notice praised Idomeneo's set design but forgot to mention Mozart.…
On Wednesday, March 1, the Boston Symphony Orchestra appeared at Carnegie Hall under conductor Andris Nelsons with pianist Emanuel Ax in what may have been the most remarkable performance of the season.
Playing Beethoven symphonies is what a symphony orchestra really ought to be doing most of the time. The New York Philharmonic performed Beethoven's Seventh and Eighth Symphonies last week under American-born Swedish conductor Herbert Blomstedt. Blomstedt is an emeritus of the Swedish and Danish…
Russian-American conductor Semyon Bychkov was supposed to be conducting Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony last week with the New York Philharmonic. Instead he got the flu—presumably as a warning to all those New Yorkers who haven't listened to their mothers about getting a flu shot—and his concerts were…
Daniel Barenboim is at Carnegie Hall with the Staatskapelle Berlin conducting a Bruckner Symphony Cycle. So all is well with the world, except for the choice of music. Which is only to say that, of the three composers famous for writing nine symphonies, Bruckner would be our third choice. But I was…
The last German offensive of World War II began at 5:30 a.m. on December 16, 1944. The rank-and-file German soldier thought he was giving Paris back to the Führer for a "Christmas present." The more experienced Wehrmacht commanders knew that, even should they reach the Meuse or—more…
The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam performed at Carnegie Hall last week under Russian-American conductor Semyon Bychkov. Because the venue is so well known and the performers are so good and the seats so expensive and hard to get, Carnegie's programmers are rather blasé on the question…
This new Matisse cut-outs show is odd, since you can see some of the greatest artworks of the 20th century and still leave feeling disappointed. Good curatorship, like good umpiring, is most obvious when it’s not there: John Elderfield helped set the bar impossibly high with the Museum of Modern…
New York
Many of my friends think Hiroshima was an unjustifiable atrocity. My usual course in atom-bomb disputes is to refer the belligerent to Donald Kagan’s brilliant 1995 piece in Commentary, “Why America Dropped the Bomb.” The reaction is consistent, and surprising: My friends do not challenge any of…
The beautiful planes that flew over the National Mall on the seventieth anniversary of V-E Day are rare not because few survived the war but because few survived the war’s aftermath.
New York
Now that the liberals who were once insurgent voices in the undergraduate student body are the presidents and deans of American universities, they’ve decided it is high time for those universities to reevaluate their outdated devotion to freedom of speech. The proper modern university, they…
New Haven, Conn.
What may be the greatest painting in our hemisphere is on temporary loan from the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Girl with a Pearl Earring (ca. 1665) hasn’t been in the United States since 1996 and is unlikely ever to be here again. We owe this traveling show of Dutch masterpieces, centering on Johannes…
New Haven
Last Friday, President Obama asked Congress for the power to consolidate government agencies, saying he’d start by rolling Commerce and five lesser departments into a single business and trade department.
New York
Yale University has now canceled the Yale Initiative for the Study of Antisemitism (YIISA), the only such program in the country. The New York Post reports that the reason for the program's termination was not lack of interest, but, likely, the program's insistence on covering all forms of…
Last Friday night, March 11, Palestinian terrorists broke into a home in the West Bank settlement of Itamar and stabbed to death everyone they found inside. The father, Udi Fogel, and his three-month-old daughter, Hadas, had their throats slit in bed. The mother, Ruth, was stabbed as she came out…
The Texas legislature is likely to approve a measure that would allow students with pistol permits to carry guns on college campus. Although the proposed law would do nothing to change the requirements for getting a permit—one would still have to be over 21, have no criminal record, no record of…
Brian Wilson’s album is a new take on favorite Gersh-win songs, as arranged and sung by the great Beach Boys songwriter, and includes two brand-new songs that Wilson assembled from Gersh-win’s uncompleted manuscripts. Larry Starr teaches music history at the University of Washington, and George…
THE VALENTINE'S DAY SHOOTING at Northern Illinois University, following last year's Virginia Tech Massacre, makes college shootings seem like an emerging fad among suicidal lunatics. There were no such shootings in the 2005-2006 academic year, one last academic year, and three this academic…
I GO TO AMITY SR. HIGH SCHOOL in Woodbridge, Connecticut--a liberal public school in a liberal state. Conservatives are scarce around here and outspoken ones are scarcer. I am so "unusual" that people (friends and even some I don't know) call me "Dan, Dan, Republican," which is a good-natured joke,…