Western classical music is often thought of as placeless: a grammar of sound that belongs everywhere and nowhere, drifting free of soil, climate, history, on some variation of Henry Russell Cleveland’s axiom from 1835, that “Music begins where language ends.” There is, we tell ourselves, a Schumann for all seasons. Africa, by contrast, is so […]
Author Archives: J.R. Patterson
J.R. Patterson is a Canadian writer. His work has appeared in The Walrus, The Guardian, and The Washington Post.
Posted inInterview
The Unconscious Process
On a recent warm autumn evening in Porto, the Russian-Armenian pianist Eva Gevorgyan performed before a crowd so spasmodic with coughing fits it may yet prove to be a locus of the next pandemic. The barking did nothing to quell Gevorgyan’s performance of Chopin, Brahms, and Schumann. Dressed in a Celedon-green sequined dress, a silken […]
Posted inInterview
The Depths of Darkness
“When I finish a cycle with Broadway tunes, or what I would call The Pops, there’s a release of energy. But, for the meat and potatoes of those concerts, I’m on my own. Of course, I’m not being told what to do, so it’s hard to think, well, how did that go over?” The rich, […]
Posted inInterview
Serious Fun
In late February, I watched Lukáš Vondráček perform Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 15, with the Prague Symphony Orchestra in that city’s Smetana Hall. He attended the piano like a Victorian surgeon, leaning over the keyboard—a consequence of poor eyesight, I later learned—with a kind of furious concentration, hacking and slashing […]
Posted inInterview
A Very Private Sense of Fear
It would be customary for a performer of James Ehnes’s stature—internationally touring and highly in-demand, with four records released in 2024, residencies in Australia and Seattle, and a recent credit on a “Star Wars” miniseries—to be precious with their time. And those who have heard, whether on record or live, his ability to imbue and […]
Posted inEssay
Healing Invisibly
It is a medical axiom that if a doctor doesn’t bring their humanity with them to work, they won’t find it on the way home. Where doctors find their particular brand of humanism—the kind that drives them toward suffering—is a mystery. But many have looked for it in music. Edward Jenner, discoverer of the smallpox […]
Posted inInterview
What Gets Us Through
Angela Hewitt needs her audience. While she may be the inheritor of Glenn Gould’s status as Canada’s preeminent classical musician, she declares herself his opposite: “It would be sad,” Hewitt says, “to give all these concerts and not enjoy the interaction with people.” Her approach to her audience—personal and generous, and giving with her time—is […]