The Terrifying Intimacy of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
Here’s how I remember my early encounters with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau: I slide the record out of its paper sleeve, drop it gently on the turntable, lower the arm and, after the throat-clearing hiss...
View ArticleThe Endlessly Shape-Shifting Emerson String Quartet
The Emerson Quartet has spent decades as a nimble monument. For nearly 30 years, these four friends — violinists Philip Setzer and Eugene Drucker, violist Lawrence Dutton and cellist David Finckel —...
View ArticleGustavo Dudamel: Electric Superconductor
The most electric young conductor on the orchestral scene today is less a trailblazer than a throwback to podium heroes of long ago. Once again, audiences throng, not just to hear Beethoven or Mahler,...
View ArticleSo Percussion and the Rise of Rhythm
Of all the long-oppressed minorities who can finally enjoy a measure of freedom and contentment, the ones who are most truly grateful to be living now must surely be the percussionists. This is their...
View ArticleThe Mystery of Johannes Ockeghem
It’s astonishing how little we know, or can intuit, about the most illustrious musician of the 15th century. With a sonorous bass voice, a succession of prestigious jobs, and a collection of devotees,...
View ArticleGabriel Kahane: Hipster Wistfulness
It’s a wonderful thing to be talented, versatile, 30-ish, well connected and living in Brooklyn, where your neighbors are likewise talented, versatile, 30-ish, and well connected — where you are, in...
View ArticleThe Joyous Rage of Joyce DiDonato
Baroque opera is a primeval emotional landscape populated by terrifying creatures: venomous queens, apoplectic gods, obsessive enemies, suicidal lovers. It is not where you would expect to find a...
View ArticleHow to Write for Violin in the Nuclear Age
At 14, when my ears were fresh and my soul pliable, I attended a string quartet concert that I remember vividly — though at a distance of more than three decades, I have begun to suspect it never took...
View ArticleThe Mutable Beauty of Bach’s B minor Mass
Bach’s B minor Mass is a masterpiece that by rights shouldn’t really exist. A setting of Catholic liturgy by a Lutheran composer, it seems to have been willed into being for no clear purpose. Though...
View ArticleRichard Wagner’s Radical Aesthetic
Why are so many Wagner lovers indifferent to all operas but his? Why is there a corps of Wagner groupies that shows up in whatever part of the globe his four-opera epic Der Ring des Nibelungen is...
View ArticleBombino: The Music is Political
Some years ago, the American documentary filmmaker Ron Wyman was bouncing around the northwestern hump of Africa, in the borderless land framed by the artificial nations of Niger, Mali, Libya, Algeria...
View ArticleConrad Tao and Timo Andres: The Past is Prologue
Some young composers have had enough of the future; it’s finally time for the past. Impatient with avant-gardes, clean slates, or radical reinventions, they sift lovingly through their influences,...
View ArticlePaul Lewis: A Gorgeous Gallop Into the Infinite
At a recent late-night recital, Paul Lewis sat a piano in a penthouse party space and played one of Schubert’s last works, the Sonata in A, D. 959, as if he were consoling everyone in the room over the...
View ArticleThe Stirring Mystery of the Male Falsetto
Every boy soprano knows that adolescence is bearing down on him, coarsening the larynx, turning vocal cords into unwieldy bits of gristle and tearing that delicate silvery sound into a cacophony of...
View ArticleCecilia, You’re Breaking Our Heart
Cecilia Bartoli has been merrily irritating her opera colleagues and connoisseurs for more than 20 years now. With her smoky-yet-nimble mezzo-soprano, her quasi-Scottish rolled Rs, and her taste for...
View ArticleJonas Kaufmann: A Knight at the Opera
Operatic voices are a fickle natural resource. Sometimes there’s a glut of mezzo-sopranos, a sufficiency of good bassos, or a few more countertenors than the world can actually use. But for reasons...
View ArticleClassical Music’s Return to Quiet
You could chart a rough history of Western music simply as a rising line of volume. Spaces expanded from chamber to stadium, audiences grew in step, instruments acquired new power, aided by...
View ArticleLangham Research Centre’s Old-School Experimentalism
Perhaps you remember tape. No? How about reels? Nothing? Hiss, transistors, needles, vinyl, grooves? If these words fail to conjure a universe of dirty, three-dimensional sound, rich in blemishes and...
View ArticleJeremy Denk: Connoisseur of Chaos
Like many self-afflicting perfectionists, the pianist Jeremy Denk probably has a slender file of negative reviews stashed in the closet. Perhaps he can’t help himself from chewing over a handful of...
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