Books continue to be written about what it was like to live in Germany under Hitler. I wonder if any of the authors have auditioned Wilhelm Furtwangler’s wartime broadcasts with the Berlin Philharmonic. They should. About a year ago, the Berlin Philharmonic issued a $250 box containing 22 CDs and a 180-page booklet. The contents comprise the complete surviving … [Read more...] about Furtwangler in Wartime
Archives for February 2020
The Best of the “Black Symphonies”
For this weekend's "Wall Street Journal" I have written an impassioned encomium for William Dawson's thrilling "Negro Folk Symphony" of 1934 -- still (alas) buried treasure: In 1926 the African-American poet Langston Hughes wrote a seminal Harlem Renaissance essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” The mountain “standing in the way of any true Negro art in … [Read more...] about The Best of the “Black Symphonies”