Monthly Archives: October 2012

Amiable Ghost

The enormous popular success some few of Rachmaninov’s works had in his lifetime is not likely to last, and musicians never regarded it with much favor. Talk about wrongheaded prognostication. That’s Eric Blom on Rachmaninoff in the 1954 edition of … Continue reading

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Critical Fare

The lavish 1996 restoration of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” premiered at San Francisco’s Castro Theater, with Kim Novak and Hitch’s daughter Patricia in attendance. I didn’t even bother trying to get a ticket; I was interested only in the restoration and … Continue reading

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Oklahoma by Twilight

Contrary to received wisdom amongst performing musicians, playing a cruise ship gig is not nirvana. It’s more like routine interspersed with gaping stretches of utter boredom. During my decade as a summertime cruise-ship regular, I read a ton of books … Continue reading

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Table for One

Custom has it that breakfast alone, whether in a café or coffee shop or restaurant, is altogether right and proper. Lunch alone, ditto. Yet there’s something socially askew about having dinner solo in a nice restaurant. Dinner in a restaurant … Continue reading

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A Man of the Times

It has been a commonplace shibboleth to place Johann Sebastian Bach as a quasi-dinosaur in his own time, an old-world man out of step with the Enlightenment-sprung currents of the mid-18th century. Certainly his sons saw him as such—“the old … Continue reading

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Glut

This morning I sent my Advanced Analysis students off to their grand adventure, the first of a string of such forays to come. To the uninitiated, the adventure doesn’t sound particularly grand; to tell the truth, it doesn’t sound like … Continue reading

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Experience

Quite recently a student took issue with several of the grades I had given her on a solfège test. It should surprise nobody to hear that grades in question were other than A or B. She was put out with … Continue reading

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Celebrating His Master’s Voice

Fortune has smiled on music lovers worldwide: EMI has been remastering their enormous back catalog into hi-def and SACD issues. Nothing quite compares to the EMI catalog; even those great stalwarts RCA Victor and Deutsche Grammophon can’t quite capture the … Continue reading

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Shakespeare, Mozart, and Mars

In re-reading Ron Rosenbaum’s The Shakespeare Wars I have been struck by his introductory essay in which he attempts to pin down some of the attributes that make Shakespeare so wonderful. It’s an intriguing question. We take it for granted … Continue reading

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