The current issue of the “New York Review of Books” carries my review of the Metropolitan Opera’s current “Aida” – a new production given fourteen times this season. It features one of the company’s heralded young stars – the soprano Angel Blue – and it’s mainly conducted by the Met’s music director, Yannick Nezet-Seguin. The result is tepid. As “Aida” is the … [Read more...] about What Ails Today’s Metropolitan Opera? — It’s in the Pit
Three Who Quit: Ives, Elgar, Sibelius and the Crisis of Modernism
The current "Musical Opinion" (UK) carries an essay of mine: “Three Who Quit: Ives, Elgar, Sibelius, and the Crisis of Modernism.” Strange bedfellows? Think again. Ultimately, my topic is the dead end afflicting twentieth century classical music. My final sentences read: “The dialectical tension between present and past, long the mainspring for musical creativity, has gone … [Read more...] about Three Who Quit: Ives, Elgar, Sibelius and the Crisis of Modernism
Bernstein, Balanchine, Ellington and the Waning of “Soft Power”
Today’s online Persuasion/The American Purpose runs an essay of mine building on the growing awareness that “soft power” diplomacy, long vital to American foreign policy, seems suddenly in abeyance. Referencing the three most potent cultural ambassadors to the USSR during the Cold War, I write in part: If American diplomacy cannot today deploy a Leonard Bernstein, George … [Read more...] about Bernstein, Balanchine, Ellington and the Waning of “Soft Power”
“An Urgent Priority” — R. I. P.: NEH (1965-2025) — A Postscript
Here's a postscript to my obituary for the National Endowment of the Humanities, and for my own Music Unwound national consortium: I am now apprised – via a form letter -- that the cancellation of Music Unwound (a 15-year-old national consortium of orchestras and universities) “represents an urgent priority for the administration.” Music Unwound has also been … [Read more...] about “An Urgent Priority” — R. I. P.: NEH (1965-2025) — A Postscript
Schubert and the Music of Exhaustion
The supreme string quartet, for me, has long been Schubert’s last, in G major -- memorably performed last Friday night by the Danish Quartet at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall. As one of the quartet’s violinists, Rune Tonsgaard Sorensen, was on parental leave, his place was taken by Yura Lee – introduced by violist Asbjorn Norgaard as a Korean-American musician from Los … [Read more...] about Schubert and the Music of Exhaustion