Category Reviews
Othello, Sounds by Jones
Othello is a masterful psychological thriller, with jealousy in the driver’s seat. Both male leads, Othello and Iago, are so jealous of Cassio that they become willing to kill when each believes the young lieutenant has wronged them, for quite different reasons. Add the psychological complexity of the work to the racial and military framing […]
The Romance of Bell
In 2002 Joshua Bell had a new $4 million violin. He had just saved the Huberman Stradivarius from ending up with a collector who intended it for a museum, the last place instruments of that caliber need to be. To raise the cash Bell sold his own Stradivarius for two million and somehow managed to […]
Joshua Bell at Symphony Center
Friday night Michael and I had the pleasure of seeing acclaimed violinist Joshua Bell at Chicago’s Symphony Center. Bell is touring with pianist Sam Haywood, and the duo brought out a great crowd of adoring fans. From our perch in the first balcony we had a great view of their fingers; I told Michael that […]
The Tempest and Tom Waits
It’s difficult to imagine what the Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s current production of The Tempest would be like without the music of Tom Waits. The production’s playbill features an interview with savvy Shakespeare Adapters/Directors Aaron Posner and Teller (Yes, the self-labeled “quieter” half of Penn and Teller), wherein they discuss a meeting with Waits to attempt to […]
Reading Dr. Sacks
I’m in the middle of reading Musicophilia, a 2007 book by Dr. Oliver Sacks I downloaded for Kindle after reading his obituary in the New York Times about a month ago. The book is making me aware of some structural brain differences found in professional musicians versus the rest of the population. Sacks points to […]
Picasso Sculpture at the MOMA (Yes,There are Violins)
In 2011 The Museum of Modern Art in New York curated a minor exhibition of Picasso’s work featuring musical subject matter entitled Picasso Guitars 1912-1914. At the time, Greta Berman, writing in The Juilliard Journal, discussed Picasso’s famous and ubiquitous musical subject matter, and especially the fact that Picasso was not a particularly musical man. […]
Hilary Hahn: A Portrait of a Portrait
When Hilary Hahn was 25 years old, back in 2005, she was already a big enough deal to warrant a biographical sketch on film – in Hilary Hahn: A Portrait, the tireless performer pulls back the curtain on her whirlwind lifestyle. Hahn never stops – one fact the prodigious violinist shares in the film is […]
Dinner Music
Very few restaurants provide dinner music – I’m not sure if it used to be more common or not. While music can be loud, and one of my complaints about restaurants can be ambient noise levels that make conversation difficult, I enjoy the presence of live music when it’s done well. Last night after a […]
Beethoven and Lenin – Anything but a Travesty
Tom Stoppard, in his eccentrically witty and brilliant play Travesties, juxtaposes choice historical figures as they might have been had they all gathered together in a library in 1917 Zurich. Stoppard can be forgiven for allowing caricature to reign in the work, since that’s the point; as _______ as any one of us frail humans […]
And All the Boys Sing Mahler Eight
While in Wichita last week, I mentioned my interest in digging up more information on the boys choir in which I participated when I was about ten years old to my mother. So on Christmas morning we took a few minutes to go hunting through our family ephemera for whatever we could find. Though we […]
Ryan Libel 