American pianist Oscar Levant (1906–1972), whose fortieth Yahrzeit was on August 14, was renowned, perhaps distractingly so, for his wit steeped in psychic pain. Born in Pittsburgh in 1906 to an Orthodox Jewish family originally from Russia, Levant was tormented by psychiatric ailments, requiring hospitalizations and medication which he made light of on radio, TV,…
Approaching springtime should make New York-area music lovers in search of Yiddishkeit look beyond the obvious choice of Felix Mendelssohn, famed composer of the “Spring Song.” On March 20 at The Austrian Cultural Forum, ardent modernist songs by Arnold Schoenberg and Alexander von Zemlinsky will be performed by mezzo-soprano Brenda Patterson and soprano Katharine Dain…
Classical music events both before and after Purim (on March 8) focus on dialogues redolent of Yiddishkeit, as New Yorkers and others will discover. On February 10 at Weill Recital Hall pianist Lia Jensen-Abbott will perform Fanny Mendelssohn’s “The Year,” a work inspired by the composer’s relationship with her brother Felix. The Hungarian Jewish composer…
Classical music lovers have long marveled at the richness of talent which emerged from the San Francisco area, from soloists Isaac Stern and Leon Fleisher to the Menuhin family. A well-researched new study out from University of California Press in October, “Music and Politics in San Francisco: From the 1906 Quake to the Second World…
An approaching New Year can be a time of rearrangements and transpositions, as Manhattan classical music lovers in search of Yiddishkeit will discover. From December 1 to 3 at Avery Fisher Hall, Gustav Mahler’s unfinished Symphony No. 10 in its revised Deryck Cooke performing edition will be conducted by Daniel Harding. Harding has recorded this…
Coming to America is normally shorthand for the opening of opportunity: apparently not for Arnold Schoenberg. Commentators on modern music have long undervalued the Vienna-born composer Arnold Schoenberg’s years in America, from 1934 until his death in 1951. Admittedly, there were some disappointments, such as when the Guggenheim Foundation notoriously refused to grant Schoenberg a…
For background sounds to Jewish American Heritage Month, why not investigate some nostalgic treasures of Hebrew education from a half-century ago, available from Smithsonian Folkways, such as 1958’s “Israeli Children’s Songs” sung by New York native Miriam Ben-Ezra; or a charming 1955 lecture, “The Hebrew Language: Commentary and Readings” by Theodor Herzl Gaster, a UK-born…
For over half a century, Alexander Goehr has been one of England’s most important composers, an avant-garde musician whose varied (and often challenging) body of work has been championed by luminaries including Pierre Boulez, Simon Rattle, Daniel Barenboim and Jacqueline de Pré. Goehr’s manuscripts have recently been acquired by the music archive of Berlin’s Akademie…
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