It’s the question us politics writers have not stopped asking each other over the past year: when we talk about Donald Trump, even if it’s to point out something ridiculous about him, are we helping or hurting? The election cycle has proved the old adage that any publicity is good publicity, to the disbelief of […]
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Posted inEssay
Unfinished
A few nights ago, I sat in Berlin’s Philharmonie listening to the Deutsches Sinfonie-Orchester Berlin under the direction of Kent Nagano. The program was practically a Greatest Hits of German romanticism and late-romanticism: Wagner’s “Tristan” prelude and “Liebestod”; the orchestral version of Schoenberg’s “Verklärte Nacht”; Schubert’s Unfinished; Richard Strauss’s “Four Last Songs.” I thought about […]
Posted inReport
Repression and Reduction
On April 29, 2016, the jury of a youth literature competition organized by the human rights group Memorial arrived at Moscow’s Dom Kino along with a group of participating schoolchildren. In front of the building, they were attacked by nationalist hooligans hurling eggs and paint. Among those present was the acclaimed novelist Lyudmila Ulitskaya, herself […]
Posted inInterview
Dresden Wall
The standard translation for the acronym of the anti-immigrant, Dresden-based protest group Pegida is Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West. But the movement’s German name uses the word Abendland—roughly, “Occident”—a term that comes closer to evoking its irrational, almost apocalyptic, clash-of-civilizations mentality. The cellist Jan Vogler grew up in East Berlin and lives […]
Posted inReview
Bach Among Palmyra’s Ruins
An open air concert is a genre of its own. People see music as something that can hallow any setting and turn it into a concert hall. But a hall’s walls are not just an acoustic box to separate an auditorium from the outside world: an audience gathered in the box is a distinct social […]
Posted inEssay
Sound Color
In his gripping and provocative memoir Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa (1997), the journalist and former Washington Post Africa bureau chief Keith B. Richburg writes, “White people traveling in East Africa are rarely stopped, rarely questioned, rarely instructed to open their bags. They jump to the front of lines, they scream and […]
Posted inInterview
Upside Down
In a February 2016 Guardian article, the violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja wrote of staid programming in classical music, “Wouldn’t some madness be preferable to this normality?” Her latest project, with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, is called “Bye Bye Beethoven.” This is not a coincidence. VAN: If you could, would you take a year or two off […]
Posted inInterview
Changing The System
I met the composer Christian Wolff for this interview some time ago in Hamburg, Germany. There were a few other people in the room—from the festival klub katarakt, which had a commissioned a new work from him—and I asked Wolff if he felt like performing an impromptu version of his prose piece “Crazy Mad Love.” […]
Posted inReport
The Broken Musician
“It was impossible for me to tell people, ‘Speak louder, shout, because I am deaf.’ Oh, how could I possibly admit a weakness in the one sense which should be more perfect in me than in others.” Beethoven, Heiligenstadt Testament, 1802 Musicians expire. For some lucky members of the profession, the musical expiry coincides with […]
Posted inPlaylist
Chains Are My Reward
While awaiting his execution by firing squad, the painter Cavaradossi sings, “I die in despair, and never before have I loved life so much!” It’s an aria of reverie, lament, and implicit protest against his captors. In this opera, Puccini’s “Tosca” (1900), power and evil aren’t abstractions: the chief of secret police has arrested and […]