Raphael Mostel
By Raphael Mostel
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The Schmooze Monday Music: Wartime Songs for Gertrude Stein
There have been New York premieres of several noteworthy works recently, including major new violin concertos by Harrison Birtwhistle and James McMillan. But easily the most interesting was the grand finale of Lincoln Center’s Tully Scope Festival on March 18: Heiner Goebbels’s “Songs of Wars I Have Seen,” which uses passages from the remarkable book…
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Culture The Posthumous Triumphs of Morton Feldman
With the sole exception of one problematic performance of his “Coptic Light” in 1986, Lincoln Center never presented any of Morton Feldman’s music during his lifetime. Indeed, even since his death, in 1987, the center has presented little of his work. A notable exception was its 1996 retrospective of Feldman’s compositions — a well-attended, highly…
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Culture The Tale of a Chance Meeting That Set the Music World on Its Ear
Originally Published in The Forward on February 2, 2001 It takes only a few people to make an era. On February 9 to February 11, Carnegie Hall will present a series of three concerts and several related events celebrating two such people who met by chance. When John Cage met Morton Feldman at a 1950…
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Art Whithersoever Thou Goest… Even to China
Beijing (formerly Peking) opera is not like anything else. Certainly it?s not like Western opera, except to the extent that both art forms have singers act out stories. To an untrained Western ear, the women?s voices in Chinese opera can resemble nothing so much as the mewing of cats, as cats and female singers of…
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Culture Classical Picks of the Year
And the Best Schnoz of the Year goes to… The six most memorable music events of 2010 included three New York premieres of operas long overdue for exposure, all with a specifically Jewish connection. ‘The Nose’ Picked by every critic, “The Nose” won this “year’s best” face-off hands-down. The Metropolitan Opera’s first production of Shostakovich’s…
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The Schmooze The Belated Triumph of a Proto-Feminist Opera
“That was simply amazing!” a normally jaded music executive exclaimed to me after the second act of Franz Schreker’s provocative “Der Ferne Klang” (“The Distant Sound”). Hounded to death as a “degenerate” composer by the rising Nazis, Schreker’s defiantly louche, wildly successful 1909 opera disappeared and had to wait a century for its first American…
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Israel News Six Degrees Of Tour de France
It turns out that the world’s most famous bicycle race, the Tour de France that just completed its 2010 run, has an unlikely origin: It was a direct result of the notorious Dreyfus Affair. The slightly condensed, rather confusing story goes something like this: When pro-Dreyfus Émile Loubet became president of the French Republic in…
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The Schmooze Six Degrees of Tour de France
It turns out that the world’s most famous bicycle race, the Tour de France, has an unlikely origin: It was a direct result of the notorious Dreyfus Affair. The slightly condensed, rather confusing story goes something like this: When pro-Dreyfus Émile Loubet became president of the French Republic in 1899, he was attacked (and beaten…
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