If Morteza Mahjoubi’s pianism is alive today, it is not out of devotion or praise for his person, but rather on account of something internal to his virtuosity: a sublime rubato that penetrates beneath the level of surface and releases melodies that cultivate and nourish the soul. Mahjoubi’s tone is so striking, its kinship to […]
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Composers, Canonized
I get itchy in temples and I make jokes at funerals. You could reasonably describe me as “irreverent.” But I have felt the divine. I was in college, and it was a Wednesday, and I was stuck in choir rehearsal. And we had a moment, together, in the middle of John Rutter’s “Requiem.” My voice […]
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Jester’s Privilege
ACT I He’d never been to the opera, and I’d never been to the opera alone. Actually, I had never been to the opera without my father, and I was pretending to still be in love with my boyfriend even though I knew that I wasn’t, so I took him as my date. We’d almost […]
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Music, Putin’s “Powerful Weapon”
In January, late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny reported that the Siberian penal colony in which he was held blasted the song “Я РУССКИЙ” (“I Am Russian”) by Putin’s favorite singer, Shaman, every day at 5 a.m., right after the national anthem. But the dictator has also instrumentalized classical music for his own purposes. A […]
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The Black Modernism of American Music
How many years should pass, in polite society, before a country is allowed to have its own national style of classical music? In 1939, over 150 years after the Declaration of Independence, Leonard Bernstein began his senior thesis at Harvard with the statement, “I propose a new and vital American nationalism.” In the essay, “The […]
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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 […]
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Boredom! At the Opera
Despite being a classical singer, I’ve fallen asleep at every Wagner opera I’ve ever attended. “Das Rheingold,” for example, makes it too easy. The seats are comfortable, the lights are dim, the exposition is endless. I feel cocooned, sardined up next to countless other people who all seem to have a higher tolerance for leitmotif than […]
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Abstracting Evil
In 2012, Austrian film director Michael Haneke criticized Steven Spielberg’s 1993 Holocaust drama, “Schindler’s List,” for the way it manipulates its audience. “The idea, the mere idea of trying to draw and create suspense out of the question of whether gas or water is going to come out of the showerhead to me is unspeakable,” […]
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Hopelessly Devoted
Paul and I say our goodbyes in the dingy half-light of a Berlin bar. His fastidious punctuality has given way to a soft fatigue brought on by the end of long night’s work, but his professional guard remains firmly in place. The hug is cordial, measured in its familiarity. We ask one another the unobtrusive […]
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Timbral Bombast
On Saturday, the Birmingham Royal Ballet will take the stage, not to the languid string melodies of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky or Adolphe Adam, but to the distorted power chords of pioneering heavy metal band Black Sabbath. The new production, “Black Sabbath – The Ballet,” honors the hometown musicians whose eponymous debut album helped spark a global […]