Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Culture Inner Fire, Outer Ice: The Willful Magic of János Starker
Legend portrays some Hungarian-Jewish musicians as belligerent extroverts, like the late conductors Georg Solti, nicknamed “the screaming skull” by his Chicago Symphony musicians, and George Szell, dubbed “Doctor Cyclops” by his Cleveland Orchestra ensemble. Yet, the mighty cellist János Starker, born in 1924 to a Hungarian-Jewish family in Budapest, has always looked impassive, in total…
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Culture Art, Truth, Beauty in Schapiro’s Letters
Meyer Schapiro Abroad: Letters to Lillian and Travel Notebooks Edited by Daniel Esterman Getty Publications, 280 pages, $39.95 The much-beloved art historian Meyer Schapiro (1904–1996), born in Šiauliai, Lithuania, immigrated with his family to New York when he was a toddler. In his decades of varied research, on subjects from Romanesque art to Picasso, from…
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News It’s Rosenberg vs. Goldberg in Cleveland
It’s Rosenberg vs. Goldberg, and the world of classical music criticism is trembling. The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s classical music critic Donald Rosenberg filed suit this month, several weeks after he was taken off the Cleveland Orchestra beat after writing about the ensemble for 18 years. Rosenberg’s suit names the newspaper and the Musical Arts Association,…
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Culture No Fear For Veil: France’s Newest Academician
On November 20, when the French-Jewish politician Simone Veil (pronounced Vay), 81, was elected to the prestigious Académie Française, her family took the news with typical self-deflating humor. Her husband, Antoine, exclaimed: “First she’s in the Grévin wax museum and now the French Academy. I hope all this isn’t leading to the Panthéon!” Veil, known…
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Music Shtick and Awe: Daniel Barenboim in New York
You’d think Godzilla, or at least an enemy flotilla, had stormed the gates of the city, the way the media has trumpeted the news; the Financial Times announces, “Daniel Barenboim has invaded New York.” The 66-year-old pianist-conductor, born in Buenos Aires to a family of Russian Ashkenazic Jews who later immigrated to Israel, is definitely…
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Culture The Man With the Yellow Star: The Jewish Life of Serge Gainsbourg
Visitors to Paris may have noticed, in an otherwise ritzy neighborhood in the posh seventh arrondissement, a small building at 5 bis Rue d e Verneuil that is abundantly covered in garish multicolored graffiti. It is the home of the late French singer/songwriter Serge Gainsbourg (1928–1991), born Lucien Ginsburg in Paris’s humble 20th arrondissement. His…
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Culture Defined by Quality
Concerts and CDs featuring composers who died during the Holocaust have become commonplace, with such once forgotten names as Viktor Ullmann (1898–1944), Pavel Haas (1899–1944) and Gideon Klein (1919–1945) receiving posthumous tributes. Yet these honors, sincere and well deserved as they undoubtedly are, tend to type composers and their music in the somber region of…
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Culture Claude of the Jungle
On November 28, the centenary of the legendary French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss will be fêted in Paris. As a centenary celebration of a legend, however, it is rather unusual, as the birthday boy is very much alive and well. Born in 1908 to a French-Jewish family — his grandfather served as a rabbi in Versailles…
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