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Jan 17, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | Anthony Daniels |David Yezzi |Pat Lipsky |Eva Resnikova
Last night was Wagner night at the New York Philharmonic. Did they do Act I of Die Walküre? No, there were no singers. They played Lorin Maazel’s Ring synthesis—his “Ring without Words.” This is a masterly concoction, by a masterly musician, Maazel. He conducted the Philharmonic in his synthesis when he was the orchestra’s music director (2002–09). He also conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in it at Carnegie Hall, in 2012. On that occasion, there was a Mozart symphony first (No. 40).
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Jan 17, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | Anthony Daniels |David Yezzi |Pat Lipsky |Eva Resnikova
Recent stories of note:“Facing multiple threats, Peruvian archaeologists remain determined to research the Americas’ oldest known civilization”Maria Luisa del Río, The Art NewspaperFor most of us, bands of violent robbers in the desert are thankfully the stuff of old Westerns. But they are an occupational hazard for Ruth Shady, an archaeologist who in 1994 discovered a five-thousand-year-old civilization on the coast of Peru, far preceding the Incas.
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Jan 14, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | David Yezzi |Eva Resnikova |Karen Wilkin |Sarah Ruden
Fiction: Lawrence Venuti and Michael Wood on Dino Buzzati’s The Bewitched Bourgeois, at McNally Jackson Books at the Seaport (January 16): In the fall of 2023, our fiction critic, Andrew Stuttaford, commended to readers a new translation of Dino Buzatti’s Il deserto dei Tartari (1940), now issued as The Stronghold—a shadowy, suggestive novel about life in a frontier garrison that may have been “[a]n oblique response to Kafka’s The Castle.” That volume’s translator, Lawrence Venuti, and...
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Jan 13, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | David Yezzi |Eva Resnikova |Sarah Ruden |Karen Wilkin
It’s often said that an immortal monkey, sitting at a typewriter with no deadline and jabbing at random, will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. For a human being who speaks English, this ought to take somewhat less than forever. An Elizabethan or Jacobean playwright, in turn, is natively proficient in early modern English and knows the work, and possibly the man, well. He may have cowritten a play or two with Shakespeare, and some of the Bard’s stuff, he feels, is really his.
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Jan 13, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | David Yezzi |Eva Resnikova |Sarah Ruden |Karen Wilkin
Yesterday, Igor Levit returned to Carnegie Hall, as he does frequently—as all great musicians should, I think. Carnegie Hall should present the best, regularly. But this does not always work out. For the reasons, consult industry insiders (who do not include me). Arcadi Volodos has not appeared in Carnegie Hall since 2003. Grigory Sokolov, since 1975. Like Igor Levit, they are Soviet-born pianists. You can see all three at the Salzburg Festival every summer.
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Jan 12, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | Sarah Ruden |David Yezzi |Anthony Daniels |James Como
When the curtain opened at the Metropolitan Opera last night, a lady behind me said, “I love this.” When it opened on Act II, a man said, “Wow.” They were so right. Onstage was La bohème, in the Zeffirelli production of 1981. The Met has staged it more than five hundred times. It is a meal ticket for the company. It is also a great production. It will go, as they all do. The Aida of Sonja Frisell, which premiered in 1988, ran for about 250 performances. It has been replaced this season.
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Jan 2, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | Anthony Daniels |David Yezzi |Pat Lipsky |Eva Resnikova
The Royal Scottish Academy Building is an elegant example of the neoclassical architecture that helped Edinburgh earn the title “the Athens of the North.” Far more impressive, however, are the grand halls of the house from which the National Galleries’ latest exhibition comes. Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, the centuries-old home of the Cavendish family, is not only a brilliant example of the English Baroque, but it also contains within its walls an impressive collection of art and artifacts.
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Dec 18, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | David Yezzi |Eva Resnikova |Karen Wilkin |Sarah Ruden
Several months ago I was practicing a piece titled “David Dubal: In Flight,” a musical portrait that Virgil Thomson composed of me many years ago. Since the late 1920s, Thomson had been enthralled with this miniature genre seemingly of his own invention and composed more than a hundred of them. I had not played my portrait in a long while, and I was more delighted than I had ever been with this one-minute production in two-voiced counterpoint.
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Dec 18, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Anthony Daniels |David Yezzi |Pat Lipsky |Eva Resnikova
“Depend upon it, sir,” said Dr. Johnson, “when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”I suppose that in logic his mind ought to continue to concentrate further until he is actually upon the scaffold itself. By then, it should be at its maximum possible density. More than one writer has been condemned to death and lived to tell the tale, most famously, perhaps, Dostoevsky.
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Dec 18, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Anthony Daniels |David Yezzi |Pat Lipsky |Eva Resnikova
The MS-13 gang member who cuts my hair knows all the best used-book shops in Mexico City. His most recent recommendation was a cavernous, two-floor store just down the street from the Coyoacán borough’s central market. On the second floor, lodged between a thin religion section and a thinner one for philosophy, is a robust wall of books labeled, in bright-red lettering, comunismo.
