On Friday evening, the conductor Riccardo Muti made his biggest play yet for New York. Mr. Muti is a brilliant, intense musician, and things are always accordingly brilliant and intense when he comes to the city.
He’s got some bad blood here. After a courtship in 2000, and then again several times over the next Read More
A few days ago, The Politicker referred to Ellis Verdi, Freddy’s new adman, as having had an “abortive cameo” in Hillary Clinton’s 2000 race, which isn’t quite right, and which is a reminder about not being glib about stuff one doesn’t know that much about.
Verdi, who now seems to be one of a Read More
Yesterday’s item on adman David Doak‘s all-but-official departure from the Ferrer campaign prompted a funny pair of responses: firm denials from the campaign that Doak is out, and also a number of tips as to who will replace him.
The likely choice is apparently a respected Madison Avenue guy who dabbles occasionally Read More
The setting was Cleveland’s vast Public Auditorium; the opera was Verdi’s La Forza del Destino ; and the Metropolitan Opera’s touring cast was an A-list of the 1950′s: Zinka Milanov, Richard Tucker, Robert Merrill, Cesare Siepi. I was 12 years old and attending my first opera, and even though my vantage point was a football Read More
Isaiah Berlin, in his essay “The Naiveté of Verdi,” describes the Italian composer as “the last great complete, self-fulfilled creator, absorbed in his art … seeking to use it for no ulterior purpose.” He calls Verdi “the last naïve master of Western music, in an age given over to the Sentimentalisches “-the self-conscious, subversive “sentimentalists,” Read More
That Verdi was the most Shakespearean of composers was no accident. Speaking of his passionate devotion to the Bard in 1850, he said that he “had it in mind to set … all the principal plays of the great dramatist.” The subject that haunted him most was one he never found the courage to tackle- Read More
Met’s Brilliant Young Singers Offer Pleasure-and Hope
In all the talk about how to rebuild in the rubble of the World Trade Center, how to restore Wall Street’s confidence in the economy and how, in general, to revive our faith in a brighter tomorrow, I have a suggestion: Pay heed to what’s happening in Read More
Classical music lovers do not, as a rule, follow their favorite performers with the obsessive attention to statistical achievement that sports fans lavish on their heroes. Itzhak Perlman has probably played the Beethoven Violin Concerto more times than Babe Ruth hit home runs, but who’s counting? Nevertheless, we have recently witnessed a local feat which Read More
At New York City Opera a few years ago, there were cries of worry in the always fretful tribe of opera junkies that the marvelously congenial summer festival on the shores of Otsego Lake in Cooperstown, N.Y., would suffer badly, even though Paul Kellogg was staying on as artistic director. And when it was announced Read More
