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1 month ago | 
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.
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1 month ago | 
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.
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1 month ago | 
newcriterion.com | John Byron Kuhner |Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Daniel Mendelsohn |John Derbyshire
In 1970, the Procurator General of the Discalced Carmelite Order, Finian Monahan, was summoned to the Vatican for a meeting. The subject of the meeting was a promising young American priest by the name of Reginald Foster. The head Latinist of the Vatican’s State Department had tapped Foster to write papal correspondence, which was at the time composed entirely in Latin. Foster wanted the job but was bound by a vow of obedience, and the decision would be made by his superiors.
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1 month ago | 
newcriterion.com | John Byron Kuhner |John Derbyshire |Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Victor Davis Hanson
One after another, orchestras are visiting Carnegie Hall, to play two or three concerts. The Cleveland Orchestra is there now, for two concerts. Tonight’s is the second. Last night’s began with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Do you remember what Robert Graves said? “The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good—in spite of all the people who say he is very good.” Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is almost a cartoon.
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1 month ago | 
newcriterion.com | John Byron Kuhner |John Derbyshire |Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Victor Davis Hanson
Robert Frost has not been lucky in his biographers.
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1 month ago | 
newcriterion.com | John Byron Kuhner |John Derbyshire |Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Victor Davis Hanson
I first met the poet Rachel Wetzsteon at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 1994. She seemed lively, chatty, and yet, by the second day of the conference, already somewhat isolated, sitting in a corner at Rebel’s Rest while the room buzzed with talk over introductory drinks. Rachel’s first book, The Other Stars, had been published earlier that year. At one conference event, six or seven writers of debut volumes of poetry gave a group reading. Rachel read longer than anyone.
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1 month ago | 
newcriterion.com | John Byron Kuhner |John Derbyshire |Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Victor Davis Hanson
From the eleventh century until the fifteenth, verse romance was the most popular narrative genre of Persian poetry. The earliest examples are very charming “entertainments” and are completely lacking in both didactic and spiritual pretensions. This was to change with Nezami (ca. 1141–1209), who came to be regarded as the greatest of all Persian poets who wrote romances. His poems had an enormous influence on subsequent poets who worked in the same genre.
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1 month ago | 
newcriterion.com | John Byron Kuhner |John Derbyshire |Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Victor Davis Hanson
Consider the likely sentiments of the people charged with looking after New York’s Columbia University when it was announced last month that approximately $400 million of government grants and contracts were being canceled. Why? Because the university—like several others—had conspicuously failed to follow laws prohibiting discrimination.
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1 month ago | 
newcriterion.com | John Byron Kuhner |John Derbyshire |Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Victor Davis Hanson
Writing for New York magazine’s “Intelligencer” column, Charlotte Klein has lately reported that “The Media Is Now Part of Trump’s War Against the Deep State.” She decries what she sees as “Trump’s apparent willingness to weaponize vast troves of government data” by making it public in furtherance of a right-wing conspiracy theory that “the media has been doing the bidding of the deep state.” As I suggested in this space last month (see “Melting the ideological permafrost” in The New...
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1 month ago | 
newcriterion.com | John Byron Kuhner |John Derbyshire |Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Victor Davis Hanson
The architectural historian and writer Gavin Stamp was born in London in 1948—“Brought up in a Tudor bungalow on the Orpington by-pass.” He died, in 2017, at the age of sixty-nine (his friend Clive Aslet memorialized him in The New Criterion of March 2018).
