At the birthplace of the ballistic missile, a concert for peace
In its first appearance abroad since 2019, the New York Philharmonic performed at a German music festival located in a former Nazi munitions factory.
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Culture Celebrate Beethoven’s 250th birthday with ‘Ode to Joy’ in Yiddish
Read this article in Yiddish. This week marks the 250th anniversary of what is believed to be the birthday of Ludwig van Beethoven, one of the most influential composers of all time, and a favorite among the Jews in Eastern Europe. Beethoven’s popular “Moonlight Sonata,” for example, is the topic of a wonderful children’s tale…
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Culture A month before her death, RBG made a (virtual) concert appearance
When Lewis Kaplan emailed Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s family, asking if she wanted to take part in a pandemic-era music festival, he didn’t know what would happen. What he didn’t expect was an immediate response from the justice’s daughter, Jane Ginsburg, telling him that the Notorious RBG was all in. No, this isn’t an exposé of…
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Culture Inside The Mind Of Arnold Schoenberg, The Genius Who Defined 20th Century Music
Editor’s note: Arnold Schoenberg was born on this day in 1874. 145 years later, we look back at the genius of the Austrian Jewish composer. What happens in the mind of a genius? Mozart’s mind was puerile; if his extraordinary sophistication with music extended to other aspects of his psyche, he didn’t show it. Van…
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Culture Inside The Mind Of Arnold Schoenberg, The Genius Who Defined 20th Century Music
What happens in the mind of a genius? Mozart’s mind was puerile; if his extraordinary sophistication with music extended to other aspects of his psyche, he didn’t show it. Van Gogh was subject to psychotic episodes, a struggle that may have impacted his work, although we can only speculate. Bits of Einstein’s brain are preserved…
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Culture For Arvo Pärt, Music And Silence Are Divine
In her essay, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” Susan Sontag writes that “the artist who creates silence or emptiness must produce something dialectical: a full void, an enriching emptiness, a resonating or eloquent silence.” Though Sontag never mentions the work of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (of whom she could hardly have been aware at the time),…
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Culture LISTEN: A Beautiful Long Lost Work By Igor Stravinsky
Starting today, The Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) will begin a five day performance run one of the all time great “lost works” of music – Igor Stravinsky’s “Chant Funebre” (Funeral Song). The piece, a short orchestral work, was written in 1908 on the occasion of the death of Stravinsky’s mentor Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. As the story goes,…
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Culture The International Street Cannibals Ensemble Tackles Schoenberg’s Tortured Quartet
When faced with immense personal grief, we are given to sobbing, to wailing, to screaming – the old categories of expression seem startlingly, absurdly inadequate, and thus we revert to a pre-linguistic stage so that we might give voice to those things that render language so helplessly impotent. But one could just as easily see this…
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