Archives for July 31, 2013

Michael Haas, Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis (Yale, $38). The first full-length history of what happened to the Jewish classical composers who, like Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Franz Schreker, Arnold Schoenberg, and Kurt Weill, ran afoul of the Nazi regime and had their music banned. A powerfully unsettling tale of ideology run amok–and of how Hitler destroyed Austro-German musical culture by trying to ensure its supremacy for all time (TT).

Fairfield Porter: Modern American Master (Parrish Art Museum, 279 Montauk Highway, Water Mill, N.Y., ongoing). For much of his adult life, Fairfield Porter lived and painted in Southampton, and many of his paintings belong to the permanent collection of the Parrish, which is now hanging them regularly rather than sporadically in its new building. Anyone interested in the work of one of America’s most insufficiently recognized modern masters, a lifelong realist who was nonetheless deeply influenced by abstract expressionism, should hasten to Water Mill and partake of this important show (TT).