Whoo. Let’s see what we’ve got going on tonight. Oh, oh, oh. Check it out. Easter’s over, baby, but you can beat the rush. I know about being forgiven, but won’t wearing a t-shirt that says so make people want to ask you what you did? In my town it would. “Whu’d . . . . Continue Reading »
I’m not a musician in any real sense of the word, only an enthusiast. In good choirs I’ve sung in, my contributions have been limited to reasonably non-incompetent alto-line filler, for pieces like Mendelssohn’s Richte mich Gott. That’s one kind of good choir: the choir which . . . . Continue Reading »
Doesn’t anybody play air guitar any more? Dude, you say. Air guitar? You mean, like, just . . . listening to some loud music and . . . pretending? Yeah, see, back in the day, what you would do was, you would put on a record in your room. A record. It’s a big round thing that comes in a . . . . Continue Reading »
If the New York Times shuts down, at least I won’t have to respond to mind-numbing items like David Brooks’ April 30 peroration, “Genius: the modern view.” Aldous Huxley’s wife Laura infamously said that her husband looked like a stupid man’s idea of what a clever . . . . Continue Reading »
Recently some friends of mine were discussing the misapplication of the word “heroic” to denote efforts which people ought to make simply as a matter of course. Staying married, for example, is not an act of heroism, at least in most cases, yet you read in the tabloids — that is, . . . . Continue Reading »
I missed the news last week that a firm in the Netherlands had purchased the rights to the Rodgers & Hammerstein songbook. Funny to think, isn’t it, that the Dutch now own these musicals? “Amsterdam, where the wind comes sweepin’ down the dikes.” Or that great musical North . . . . Continue Reading »
What do you think, Sally? Would the younger kids in your house enjoy or employ NEW! Feather and Marabou Angel Wings?“Get ready for Christmas plays and other plays in your church group with these adorable Angel Wings,” the advertising copy at the crafts store says. But looking at these, . . . . Continue Reading »
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 (Wagner’s Die Walküre ); a polygamous American seduces and later abandons an Asian girl and their child . . . . Continue Reading »
In opera, it’s good to be the tenor. You get the high notes, you get the girl, and you get the big fees. And this has been a half century rich in remarkable tenors. Perhaps there has been no voice so purely beautiful as Luciano Pavarotti’s (or as profitable), and probably no singer so broadly . . . . Continue Reading »
Twenty-five years ago when there was still a Communist East Germany, I interviewed several boys from Leipzig’s Thomanerchor, the choir once led by Johann Sebastian Bach. Many of those children came from atheistic homes. “Is it possible to sing Bach without faith?” I asked them. “Probably . . . . Continue Reading »
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