Harvey Sachs

I am a writer, lecturer, music historian, translator, and arts administrator. Early in my career, I worked as a conductor, albeit at modest levels, for about a dozen years, and this gave me some insight into the practical side of music-making.

I've written five books of my own (biographies of Toscanini and Arthur Rubinstein, two collections of essays, and the history book Music in Fascist Italy, co-authored;Placido Domingo's My First Forty Years and Sir Georg Solti's Memoirs (called Solti on Solti in the UK), and edited and translated The Letters of Arturo Toscanini; my new book, The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824, will be published in the spring of 2010 by Random House in the US and by Faber & Faber in the UK.   I've also published over six hundred other pieces, ranging from CD liner notes to articles in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and from essays in the Times Literary Supplement (London) and Yale Review to profiles in the New Yorker, in addition to having done much radio work and two television documentaries (the second one, "Toscanini in His Own Words", was nominated for a 2009 Gemini Award in Canada). I've done much translating, too, and have lectured at schools, universities, and cultural institutions all over North America and Europe. From 2004 to 2006 I was Artistic Director of the Societa del Quartetto di Milano, Italy's oldest extant concert organization (founded 1864), which engages world-famous recitalists, chamber and early music ensembles, and occasionally major symphony orchestras.  I am on the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where, during the 2009-10 academic year, I am teaching courses in History of Opera and History of Singing and a seminar on "Late Beethoven".

 I've lived a frequently unsettled life in a variety of places: Cleveland (I was born and grew up there); New York (I lived there as a student and have been residing there again since 2006); Toronto; Peterborough, Ontario; Milan; London; two Tuscan villages in the province of Arezzo (my twenty-five-year-old son and eleven-year-old daughter were born in Tuscany); and Lugano, Switzerland - from a minimum of three to a maximum of twenty years in each of them. I've observed life in general and musical/cultural life in particular in each location and have given as much thought as I've been capable of giving to what I've observed. I hope that this blog will demonstrate - to myself as well as to others - that endless traipsing around can have some positive aspects in addition to the obvious negative ones. In any case, I want this to be an informal, stimulating forum, and I look forward to meeting my readers electronically.

January 27, 2008 4:33 PM | | Comments (0)

Categories:

Leave a comment

Me Elsewhere

Blogroll

Ensemble for the Romantic Century

www.freeforallattownhall.org

(These are two organizations that any music lovers in the New York area should get to know.)

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Douglas McLennan published on January 27, 2008 4:33 PM.

Contact me was the previous entry in this blog.

Overflow is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

AJ Ads


AJ Blogs

AJBlogCentral | rss

culture
About Last Night
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Artful Manager
Andrew Taylor on the business of arts & culture
blog riley
rock culture approximately
critical difference
Laura Collins-Hughes on arts, culture and coverage
Dewey21C
Richard Kessler on arts education
diacritical
Douglas McLennan's blog
Dog Days
Dalouge Smith advocates for the Arts
Flyover
Art from the American Outback
Life's a Pitch
For immediate release: the arts are marketable
Mind the Gap
No genre is the new genre
Performance Monkey
David Jays on theatre and dance
Plain English
Paul Levy measures the Angles
Real Clear Arts
Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture
Rockwell Matters
John Rockwell on the arts
Straight Up |
Jan Herman - arts, media & culture with 'tude

dance
Foot in Mouth
Apollinaire Scherr talks about dance
Seeing Things
Tobi Tobias on dance et al...

jazz
Jazz Beyond Jazz
Howard Mandel's freelance Urban Improvisation
ListenGood
Focus on New Orleans. Jazz and Other Sounds
Rifftides
Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

media
Out There
Jeff Weinstein's Cultural Mixology
Serious Popcorn
Martha Bayles on Film...

classical music
Creative Destruction
Fresh ideas on building arts communities
The Future of Classical Music?
Greg Sandow performs a book-in-progress
On the Record
Exploring Orchestras w/ Henry Fogel
Overflow
Harvey Sachs on music, and various digressions
PianoMorphosis
Bruce Brubaker on all things Piano
PostClassic
Kyle Gann on music after the fact
Sandow
Greg Sandow on the future of Classical Music
Slipped Disc
Norman Lebrecht on Shifting Sound Worlds

publishing
book/daddy
Jerome Weeks on Books
Quick Study
Scott McLemee on books, ideas & trash-culture ephemera

theatre
Drama Queen
Wendy Rosenfield: covering drama, onstage and off
lies like truth
Chloe Veltman on how culture will save the world

visual
Aesthetic Grounds
Public Art, Public Space
Another Bouncing Ball
Regina Hackett takes her Art To Go
Artopia
John Perreault's art diary
CultureGrrl
Lee Rosenbaum's Cultural Commentary
Modern Art Notes
Tyler Green's modern & contemporary art blog
Creative Commons License
This weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.