Archives for February 3, 2014

“In Washington and around the country, Mrs. Mondale became known as a tireless advocate for the cultivation of the arts. … She traveled around the country attending museum exhibitions, dedicating new works of art and otherwise directing national attention on artists, noted or undiscovered, whom she admired.”

On a cloudy December afternoon, Joshua Hammer follows the Nobel laureate from his native Cihangir (once the Greek quarter, later a red-light district, now Turkey’s Greenwich Village) to a lunch cart in a muddy plaza on the Bosporus, across the Golden Horn and past the grand and faded buildings of the late Ottoman government, to a favorite hole-in-the-wall near the Fatih Mosque,

He led orchestras in Denmark and Japan as well as in a number of German cities, and he spent a notable decade as music director of the Hamburg State Opera. Most famously, perhaps, he served a brief and stormy tenure as the first foreign chief conductor of the Czech Philharmonic.

“He often played creeps, but he rarely played them creepily. His metier was human loneliness — the terrible uncinematic kind that has very little to do with high-noon heroism and everything to do with everyday empathy — and the necessary curse of human self-knowledge.”

“A big question about her performance was, would she do it straight? Would she sing the anthem how it was written, or would she adopt the embellishments that have become de rigueur at big sporting events?”