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Dec 10, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | James Nuechterlein |Anthony Daniels |Leszek Kolakowski |Douglas Murray
When Piotr Beczała took the stage at Carnegie Hall last night, he was greeted by huge applause—huge and sustained applause. This must be encouraging to a recitalist, even one as experienced and famous as Beczała. He is a Polish tenor, as you know, and he was accompanied by Helmut Deutsch, the veteran Austrian pianist. Deutsch is the regular accompanist of another tenor star, too: Jonas Kaufmann (a German). Both Beczała and Kaufmann know a good thing when they see or hear it.
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Dec 9, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | James Nuechterlein |Anthony Daniels |Douglas Murray |Leszek Kolakowski
Oliver Sacks’s Letters, at 752 pages, is anachronistic in two respects. First, there is the spectacle of six decades’ worth of correspondence, meticulously preserved (Oliver Sacks cloned every outgoing missive, whether by carbon copy, typewriter, or photocopier), tracking the growth and preoccupations of an intellectual giant.
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Dec 4, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Emily Smith |Douglas Murray |Theodore Dalrymple |Pat Rogers
But Bonhoeffer is known to history not simply as a victim of Nazi horror but as a theologian of note. His appeal is startlingly ecumenical: He finds adherents across the Christian spectrum from conservative evangelicals to Lutherans (of various stripes) to liberal Protestants to celebrants of the death of God.
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Dec 3, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Emily Smith |Douglas Murray |Theodore Dalrymple |Pat Rogers
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are leading a team of detectives to ferret out waste and fraud in the federal budget with an eye to cutting as much as $2 trillion in federal spending. That will not be easy to do: every program has an army of career employees, lobbyists, and journalists ready to defend it. Nevertheless, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, team is already compiling a list of programs and agencies to be cut or severely reduced in scale.
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Dec 3, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Emily Smith |Douglas Murray |Theodore Dalrymple |Pat Rogers
His bio begins, “At only 29 years old . . .” The bio is that of Filippo Gorini, who appeared at Weill Recital Hall on November 21. He is an Italian pianist. As a rule, bios mention the age of the musician when they are young. And, again, when they are (very) old. In between: silence, on the question of age. People hang on to their twenties, don’t they? “I’m twenty-nine. Not yet thirty, baby!” Do they hang on to their teens, too? Last week, the pianist Yunchan Lim appeared with the New York Philharmonic.
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Dec 2, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Emily Smith |Theodore Dalrymple |Douglas Murray |Pat Rogers
Kazuki Yamada, from Japan, is the music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, in England. That position has proven a stepping-stone to yet bigger podiums. But it is a big and distinguished podium in itself. On Saturday night, Maestro Yamada guest-conducted the New York Philharmonic. The opening piece was a short one by a friend and countryman of his: Dai Fujikura, born in 1977. I will discuss this piece in a forthcoming chronicle for the magazine, which is to say, the print magazine.
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Nov 27, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Theodore Dalrymple |Paul Tucker |Emily Smith |Douglas Murray
In any form, Shakespeare’s Macbeth carries a whiff of superstition and a presentiment of bad luck. Washington National Opera’s current production of Giuseppe Verdi’s operatic version, its first Macbeth in seventeen years, opened to a capital suffused with apprehension and a profound sense of foreboding following the extraordinary reelection of Donald J. Trump.
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Nov 25, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Paul Tucker |Douglas Murray |Theodore Dalrymple |Emily Smith
Last week was a very good one for orchestras in New York. The Berlin Philharmonic played two programs at Carnegie Hall. So did the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam. There was also the hometown orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, which performed under the baton of Paavo Järvi. For my review of the New Yorkers’ Wednesday concert, go here. For my review of the Berliners’ Monday concert, go here. The Amsterdammers played on Friday and Saturday nights.
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Nov 21, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Vasily Rudich |Hilton Kramer |Douglas Murray |Larry P. Arnn
Most art lovers know Jusepe de Ribera’s The Club-Footed Boy (1642) in the Louvre, but much of his work can get lost among the Caravaggesque shuffle. It was not so in seventeenth-century Naples, where he settled in 1616 after a decade or so in Rome, or nineteenth-century Paris, where his art was exalted by writers such as Théophile Gautier and Baudelaire and many painters, first Jacques-Louis David and later Jean-François Millet and Edouard Manet. Byron even mentioned Ribera’s painting in Don Juan.
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Nov 21, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Vasily Rudich |Hilton Kramer |Douglas Murray |Larry P. Arnn
The classic format of an orchestral concert is overture–concerto–symphony. Last night at the New York Philharmonic, we had concerto–symphony. The former piece was the Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37, by Beethoven. The soloist? Yefim Bronfman. The conductor? Paavo Järvi (son of Neeme, the venerable Estonian conductor). Bronfman is a frequent player of Beethoven concertos. He played all five of them with the New York Philharmonic in the 2013–14 season.
