Archive
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Articles
The Classical Age
Why Classical Music Still Matters by Lawrence Kramer University of California Press, 251 pages, $24.95 It’s perhaps the most stunning comment I’ve ever read about music. Fairly early in...
Bach to the Future
Johann Sebastian Bach: Life and Work by martin geck harcourt, 752 pages, $40 The collected works of Johann Sebastian Bach take up slightly more than six feet of shelf space...
The Bigot’s Opera
The Commander enters the living room carrying a big black Bible. He reads Genesis 30:1-3 to his middle-aged wife and to Offred, her handmaid. The scripture finished, the wife...
San Francisco Sacred (II)
Several times during the San Francisco Opera’s (SFO) remarkable production of Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking (which I discussed in Part I of this essay last month ), Sister...
San Francisco Sacred (I)
We do not customarily look to opera for moral edification. Examples abound: twins, separated at birth, reunite and conceive a superman child before one is killed by his father...
A Musical Requiem
Timing is everything. To complete his three-year tenure as composer-in-residence with the Pacific Symphony (an ensemble in Orange County, California), Richard Danielpour planned to write a large choral work...
One Man’s Bach
The True Life of J.S. Bach By Klaus Eidam , translated by Hoyt Rogers Basic. 432 pp. $35 Nicht Bach, sondern Meer sein! Beethoven’s famous pun on Johann Sebastian...
Passion Stomp
The ovation at the close of its premiere in Stuttgart was so raucous that people out on the street thought a pop concert was ending. In Boston the critics...
All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics
Are there prizes for titles and dust jackets? If so, Spence Publishing should win them both for All Shook Up . I don’t know when I’ve seen a philosophy...
The Blight of Cultural Rights
Last December, soon after the Supreme Court had pulled the chain on Florida’s chad fest, Bill Ivey, the Clinton-appointed director of the National Endowment for the Arts, spoke to...
Sing Unto the Lord
Jon Vickers:A Hero’s Lifeby jeannie williamsnortheastern university press, 432 pages, $29.95 In opera, it’s good to be the tenor. You get the high notes, you get the girl, and...
Sacred Fanfares
The international broadcast of the opening of Scotland’s new parliament in July 1999 gave the world more to see than just Queen Elizabeth’s much ballyhooed thistle-inspired frock. It also...
Apostles of Rock
Apostles of Rock: The Splintered World of Contemporary Christian Music by jay r. howard and john m. streck university press of kentucky, 304 pages, $29.95 “Redemption.” The banner headline...