American singer-songwriter Carole King will be awarded the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, the U.S. national library said on Thursday. The multiple Grammy Award winner co-wrote her first No. 1 hit at age 17 with then-husband Gerry Goffin and was the first female solo artist to sell more than 10 million copies…
In a 1935 review of “Porgy and Bess,” Virgil Thomson, one of America’s most distinguished music critics, famously dismissed George Gershwin’s music as a form of “gefilte fish orchestration,” harshly consigning it to the ghetto of Jewish music rather than situating it within the broad expanse of American culture. Lazare Saminsky, Thomson’s contemporary and a…
George Gershwin was insecure. He never showed it at high-society parties, where he could always be found perched at the nearest piano like a king on his throne. (He played incessantly. Once, when Gershwin wondered aloud if his music would be performed in 100 years, his friend Oscar Levant quipped, “It will be if you’re…
A notoriously anti-Semitic poet claimed that April is the cruelest month; all the more reason for Manhattanites to sweeten it with delightful classical concerts redolent with Yiddishkeit. On March 29, the Israeli-American violinist Yuval Waldman will perform “Music Forgotten and Remembered” at Merkin Concert Hall, including such rarities as Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s 1952 “Rhapsody on Moldavian…
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