It’s Not Over Yet: Babayan, Trifonov, Yuja Wang
At my age – I somehow just turned seventy – it’s considered normal to wax “sentimental” and yearn for better times. Nostalgia: a cliché....
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josephirvinghorowi
Feb 18, 20187 min read
The Gershwin Moment
Gerstein had recorded a Gershwin album and wanted to know if I were interested in writing a note for it. I was more than interested. Not...
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josephirvinghorowi
Feb 11, 20183 min read
Yannick’s Hollow Parsifal
Photo by Marco Borggreve The highwater mark for Wagner at the Metropolitan Opera in recent decades was the 2013 Parsifal, handsomely...
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josephirvinghorowi
Feb 7, 20185 min read
Rethinking “Classical Radio” — Part Two
Photo by Tom Wolff Sudip Bose, the superb music critic for The American Scholar (he is also Managing Editor), writes about PostClassical...
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josephirvinghorowi
Feb 3, 20186 min read
Another Cheap Shot at Wagner
In 1866, a Munich newspaper reported that Minna Wagner, the recently deceased wife of the composer Richard Wagner, had lived in “direst...
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josephirvinghorowi
Jan 19, 20182 min read
Exalting Bruckner at Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall, a few blocks downtown, is ideal for Bruckner, and I’ve heard a lot of it there. The conductors were Claudio Abbado, Daniel...
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josephirvinghorowi
Jan 16, 20184 min read
America’s Most Exceptional Orchestra
Setting aside PostClassical Ensemble, the guerilla DC chamber orchestra I co-founded fourteen years ago, the most exceptional American...
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josephirvinghorowi
Dec 22, 20174 min read
The Case of James Levine: Taking Stock
When a pianist plays the piano, when a violinist plays the violin, when a conductor conducts an orchestra, the performer channels music...
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josephirvinghorowi
Dec 17, 20173 min read
Schubert Uncorked
The timelessness of Winterreise, its limitless expressive parameters, tantalize singers to do something more. It has sometimes been...
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josephirvinghorowi
Dec 13, 20174 min read
Aida at the Met
Low and behold, C. L. O., age 83, now has his own blog. The omniscient graybeard I had envisioned was at the time a young adult in his...
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josephirvinghorowi
Dec 10, 20173 min read
Music and WW II: Eisler, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Stravinsky
PostClassical Ensemble inaugurated its new residency at Washington National Cathedral with a World War II program – “Music in Wartime” –...
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josephirvinghorowi
Nov 18, 20172 min read
Arnold Schoenberg’s Musical Response to FDR
What kind of American was Arnold Schoenberg? In Los Angeles, a Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany, he adopted English as his primary...
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josephirvinghorowi
Oct 22, 20173 min read
The Most Under-Rated 20th Century American Composer — Take Two
Back in the thirties and forties, there were no American music historians to tell the story of American classical music. So the task fell...
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josephirvinghorowi
Sep 17, 20173 min read
“The Difference Between Quality Art and Crap” Take Four
Processing my exchange with Vladimir Feltsman, I find myself distracted by something I have long more or less ignored: the art of the...
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josephirvinghorowi
Sep 14, 20172 min read
“The Difference Between Quality Art and Crap” Take Three
Though as usual most of the feedback to my recent blogs comes via private emails rather than public responses, a flurry of interesting...
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josephirvinghorowi
Sep 12, 20171 min read
“The Difference Between Quality Art and Crap” Take Two
My exchange with Vladimir Feltsman about “quality art” versus “crap” was posted on youtube and elicited this response: “Two oldies...
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josephirvinghorowi
Sep 10, 20172 min read
“The Difference Between Quality Art and Crap”
I was chatting with Vladimir Feltsman last Spring about PostClassical Ensemble’s 2017-18 immersion experience, “The Russian Experiment,”...
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josephirvinghorowi
Sep 8, 20173 min read
The Arts in the Age of Trump (continued)
The Age of Trump has rapidly changed the American cultural landscape in many ways. In the silo of classical music, there is suddenly a...
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josephirvinghorowi
Sep 6, 20174 min read
Copland and the Cold War
PostClassical Ensemble’s most recent WWFM “PostClassical” radio show is “Copland and the Cold War” – aired last Friday and now archived....
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josephirvinghorowi
Aug 6, 20173 min read
Milstein vs. Szigeti
My frustrations with a recent performance of Brahms’ Violin Concerto sent me to youtube in search of something different: an act of...
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