-
2 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Paul du Quenoy |Douglas Murray |Hilton Kramer |Robert Erickson
Rare is the opera that continues to be performed in two languages, but the exigencies of the Paris Opera have imprinted that legacy on a handful of works. Many are mid-nineteenth-century Italian stalwarts that were introduced in French to conquer what Walter Benjamin identified as “the capital of the nineteenth century.”We normally call Giuseppe Verdi’s great opera of religion and power Don Carlo, without the s. But with the added letter, the connoisseur knows he is getting the French version.
-
3 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Paul du Quenoy |Douglas Murray |Hilton Kramer |Robert Erickson
Palm Beach slows down after Easter, with traffic notably easing up through the month of May as the largely seasonal community packs up for Europe or the Hamptons. That, however, was no stumbling block for the Palm Beach Symphony, which presented an extra late-season “encore” program that sold out, defying all seasonal demographic trends.
-
Mar 25, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | John Byron Kuhner |Hilton Kramer |Daniel Mendelsohn |Eric Ormsby
Art:Paul Landacre: California Hills, Hollywood, and the World Beyond, A Catalogue Raisonné, by Jake Milgram Wien (Abbeville Press): “There was nothing small about [Paul] Landacre’s vision,” writes Dana Gioia in his afterword to the two-volume catalogue raisonné of California’s greatest wood engraver. “Despite their modest dimensions, his best prints are monumental and perdurable.” The same might be said of this finely chiseled box set produced by Abbeville Press.
-
Mar 24, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | John Byron Kuhner |Hilton Kramer |Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Daniel Mendelsohn
In May 2023, I had a review that began, “It’s Mozart Month at the Metropolitan Opera.” Two new productions had premiered in the house: of Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute. March 2025 is another Mozart Month at the Met. The company revived The Magic Flute last night, and will revive its Marriage of Figaro on the 31st. The Met’s Magic Flute production is the handiwork of Simon McBurney. I wrote about the production at some length when it premiered.
-
Nov 22, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Vasily Rudich |Hilton Kramer |Douglas Murray |Paul Tucker
Recent stories of note:“How Professors Killed Literature”Reinaldo Laddaga, CompactLast month, the internet was atwitter over a headline in The Atlantic: “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” To explain the growing phenomenon of Ivy League students who are apparently unable to read a book in its entirety, the piece pointed to changing K–12 English curricula—especially those meant to bolster standardized-testing performance—as one cause.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Nov 20, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Douglas Murray |Vasily Rudich |Hilton Kramer |Larry P. Arnn
It is with great sadness that we report the death of Bernie Marcus, who died last month in Boca Raton, Florida, at the age of ninety-five. To the world at large, Bernie is known first of all as the cofounder and longtime head of Home Depot, the compendious chain of hardware and home-improvement emporia. Bernie and his cofounders opened their first two stores in Atlanta in 1979. Today there are more than 2,300 outlets worldwide, with over two thousand in the United States.
-
Nov 20, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Douglas Murray |Vasily Rudich |Hilton Kramer |Larry P. Arnn
In Whit Stillman’s film Barcelona (1994), there is a scene in which Chris Eigeman’s character, an American naval officer in uniform in the Catalan capital, is taunted in the street by a pretty local girl with the epithet facha, or fascist. Naturally, he takes exception to this, pointing out that a great many men wearing the uniform of the American armed forces had died fighting against fascism.
-
Nov 20, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Douglas Murray |Vasily Rudich |Hilton Kramer |Larry P. Arnn
10:00 a.m.–11:00 a.m.: Tea, Cocoa, and Self-Care11:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m.: Legos Station12:00 p.m.–1:00 p.m.: Healthy Treats and Healthy Habits1:00 p.m.–2:00 p.m.: Coloring and Mindfulness Exercises2:00 p.m.–3:00 p.m.: Milk and Cookies4:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m.: Legos and Coloring5:00 p.m.–6:00 p.m.: Snacks and Self-Guided Meditation. Future diplomats of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your Legos.
