My forthcoming novel, The Disciple: A Wagnerian Tale of the Gilded Age, may be my best book. A prequel to The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York (2023), it’s already available via pre-order. (And if you order both books, you get a discount.) My story tracks the prodigious American impact of Richard Wagner’s protégé Anton Seidl. It challenges obstinate stereotypes of Gilded … [Read more...] about My New Novel: “The Disciple”
John Luther Adams on “Why I Moved from the US to Australia”
A couple of my recent blogs – here and here -- have saluted John Luther Adams as “among the most esteemed present-day American composers for orchestra. . . . Encountering Adams’s Become Ocean on a 21st-century symphonic program is so fundamentally enthralling that it risks cliché. It is the proverbial oasis in the desert. The Sahara here is contemporary American … [Read more...] about John Luther Adams on “Why I Moved from the US to Australia”
“Ur Kind of Music?”
I cannot think of a better conversationalist about music, and about the state of things musical today, than the conductor Kenneth Woods. Ken is an American based in the UK, where he conducts the English Symphony Orchestra in Worcester and resides in Wales. He programs bravely and insightfully. He presides over a Mahler festival in Boulder and an Elgar festival in … [Read more...] about “Ur Kind of Music?”
Was Sid Caesar’s Cancellation a Media Parable for Today?
It must mean a lot that I can remember watching Sid Caesar’s “Show of Shows” on TV with my parents as a young child. For one thing, I don’t recall watching anything else as a family. For another, Caesar’s “Show of Shows” went off the air in 1954 and I was born in 1948. So I was all of six years old. The memory stuck. Caesar virtually disappeared from television when … [Read more...] about Was Sid Caesar’s Cancellation a Media Parable for Today?
Who Wrote “Porgy and Bess”?
It must mean something that the highest creative achievement in American classical music is permanently controversial. When Porgy and Bess premiered on Broadway in 1935, a typical critical reaction was: “What is it?” American-born classical musicians (unlike their European-born brethren) marginalized George Gershwin as an interloper, a gifted dilettante. Later, in the 1950s, … [Read more...] about Who Wrote “Porgy and Bess”?