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1 week ago | 
newcriterion.com | Douglas Murray |Heather Mac Donald |Samuel Lipman |Brooke Allen
America, so the received wisdom goes, is home to five great orchestras: the New York Philharmonic, the symphony orchestras of Boston and Chicago, and the orchestras of Philadelphia and Cleveland. To this “Big Five,” one should rightly add the National Symphony Orchestra, which performs mainly at Washington’s recently newsworthy John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
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2 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Douglas Murray |Heather Mac Donald |Samuel Lipman |Brooke Allen
There is considerable irony in the upcoming events centering on Paul Cézanne in his hometown of Aix-en-Provence, France. Although today there is a large statue of the artist at the city’s central plaza, Place Charles De Gaulle, and the sidewalks are studded with medallions bearing the artist’s name and a large C encircling the city crest, Cézanne was virtually a stranger to his own municipality during his lifetime.
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2 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Douglas Murray |Heather Mac Donald |Samuel Lipman |Brooke Allen
In the last few days, the New York Philharmonic has been conducted by Iván Fischer, the Hungarian. He is one of the Fabulous Fischer Brothers, the other being Ádám, also a conductor. Iván’s program with the Philharmonic consisted of Mozart on the first half and the Fischers’ fellow Hungarian, Béla Bartók, on the second. I attended Saturday night’s concert. The program began with an overture (a good way to begin): that to The Magic Flute. The orchestra started almost together.
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2 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Douglas Murray |Heather Mac Donald |Samuel Lipman |Joshua Katz
Last month, the University of Oxford announced in the weekly Gazette a series of proposed “changes to the Conduct of Ceremonies in Congregation, and certain other Ceremonies.” Among these changes are some alterations to the Latin spoken at the conferral of degrees, which, the university claims, are “necessary so that the Latin used can refer to those who identify as non-binary, as well as those who identify as male and female.” The necessity, it should be stressed, is not obvious since the...
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3 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Douglas Murray |Heather Mac Donald |Gary Saul Morson |Thomas Philbrick
Few cities can rival Vienna’s list of cultural and artistic luminaries. The thinkers Ludwig Wittgenstein, Carl Menger, Viktor Frankl, Friederich Hayek, and Sigmund Freud were all Viennese. So were the writers Stefan Zweig, Ignaz Castelli, and Arthur Schnitzler. And then, of course, there are Vienna’s composers: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Mahler, the Strausses (all three of them), Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg, among others.
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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.
