It is no small feat to recreate the world and emotions of a bygone era. But in his astonishing show celebrating his grandparents, Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, who were superstars of the Yiddish theater, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas has done it. And it is a joy. PBS’s “Great Performances” is broadcasting “The Thomashefskys: Music and…
In tandem with three New York concerts given by the Berlin Philharmonic in February, New York University’s Deutsches Haus has opened an exhibition of Holocaust survivor David Friedmann’s “Lost Musician Portraits” from the 1920s. These sketches of Berlin Philharmonic members were drawn from life, and captured each of the artists in the act of performing….
Right up until his death, on December 24 at age 108, Dutch-born singer and actor Johannes Heesters was still performing the songs that had made him famous and, in some circles, infamous. Beloved and much honored in Germany and Austria for a steady stream of stage, screen and television roles and recordings, Heesters owed his…
“Kommilitonen!” By Peter Maxwell Davies Juilliard Vocal Arts Photo by Nan Melville Topping my list of the best classical performances of 2011 was that rarest of things: a brilliant operatic rendering of real historic events that engaged the audience emotionally, morally and intellectually. Juilliard presented the American premiere of “Kommilitonen!” (“Fellow Students!”) composed by Peter…
Just in time for the High Holy Days, the Metropolitan Opera is bringing back its production of one of the few works of music that helped change history. “Nabucco” (Nebuchadnezzar), a wildly eccentric story inspired by the biblical Lamentations of Jeremiah, was Giuseppe Verdi’s first professional breakthrough, and it helped inspire the Risorgiomento, which ended…
Mark Twain’s astute observation that “a lie well-told is immortal” keeps coming to mind on the subject of the Dresden firebombing. As I was preparing in May for my first trip to Dresden, I was startled to hear a report by Tom Vitale on National Public Radio in which he repeated the propaganda of Josef…
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…
In 1982, musician, composer and writer Raphael Mostel was walking down Lexington Avenue, when a sweater in the window of a Himalayan gift shop caught his eye. Going inside for a closer look, Mostel heard a sound, unlike anything he’d heard before, that quickly chased all thoughts of the sweater from his mind. It was…
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