Among the cameos in Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, Kira Thurman’s jam-packed history of Black performers in German-speaking Europe, is Claudio Brindis de Salas Garrido. Thurman describes the virtuoso violinist as “a mirror reflecting German conversations about Black masculine musicality in the Kaiserreich,” or the German Empire. […]
Category: Columns
Posted inStuff I’ve Been Hearing
A Closer Look
“It is strange,” writes Sonya Bilocerkowycz in On Our Way Home from the Revolution, “how the match of one fruit seller in Tunisia lit the whole Arab Spring. I wonder what would have happened if the local authorities in Sidi Bouzid had just picked a different day to bother him.… Now it’s after the revolution, […]
Posted inStuff I’ve Been Hearing
Reference, Reframed
When you think about it, it’s a wonder that Dvořák didn’t emerge as a hero of the pandemic. Perhaps we’re too conditioned to think of him as the composer of the “Slavonic Dances” or that one opera that has demonstrated you can have a Black woman play the Little Mermaid and the world won’t implode. […]
Posted inStuff I’ve Been Hearing
Weather Patterns
“You are the sky,” says the Tibetan Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön. “Everything else is just the weather.” Chödrön offers this as a guide for dealing with strong emotions—a more tangible variation on “this too shall pass.” Emotions arise and, while they feel like they may fully inhabit every pore of our body, they rarely leave […]
Posted inStuff I’ve Been Hearing
In the Wake
Classical music isn’t known for being in-the-moment: Seasons are planned years in advance, and there are people who still refer to “The Rite of Spring” (1913) as “contemporary” music. Even in this deferred environment, however, lockdown albums and works composed in the mindset of social distancing are nothing new. With so much downtime and so […]
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Sense and Sensuality
Simon Zaoui, Pierre Fouchenneret, Raphaël Merlin, Marie Chilemme, and Quatuor Strada: “Gabriel Fauré: Horizons II” (Aparté) Marie-Eve Munger, Les Boréades de Montréal, Philippe Bourque: “Maestrino Mozart” (ATMA Classique) Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, Kirill Gerstein, Marie-Christine Zupancic: “Mieczysław Weinberg: Symphonies Nos. 3 & 7, Flute Concerto No. 1” (Deutsche Grammophon) […]
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Beauty in Shadows
Daisy Press: “You Are the Flower — Music from Hildegard von Bingen, Vol. 1” (StorySound Records) Kotoka Suzuki: “Shimmer, Tree” (Starkland) Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir: “strengur” (Carrier Records) “The quality that we call beauty,” writes Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, “must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came […]
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The Textural and the Tactile
Robert Levin: “Mozart: The Piano Sonatas on Mozart’s Fortepiano” (ECM) Diyang Mei, Oliver Triendl: “Viola à l’école de Paris” (Avi Music) Claire Bryant: “Whole Heart” (Bright Shiny Things) In Richard Eyre’s 2004 film “Stage Beauty,” the London theater scene is at a crossroads when King Charles II allows women to legally perform onstage for the […]
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Reaching the Surface
John Wilson, Sinfonia of London: “Ravel: Orchestral Works” (Chandos) Les Musiciens du Louvre-Grenoble, Marc Minkowski: “Haydn: ‘London’ Symphonies” (Naïve) Les Talens Lyriques, Christophe Rousset, et. al.: “Lully: ‘Armide’” (Aparté) In 1980, the city of Lausanne, Switzerland commissioned Jean-Luc Godard to create a short film in celebration of its quincentenary, one of two that they would […]
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The Best is Noise
In an ongoing effort to spend as little time as possible with my own thoughts, I often have something on: A new album, a podcast, an audiobook, the same recording of “Chess” that I’ve been playing into warped oblivion for the last two decades… They all more or less see the same concentrated output of […]