Matthew Gurewitsch

3 weeks ago | airmail.news | Matthew Gurewitsch

When a dramatic character starts mouthing another character’s lines, the director is making a point, as at the top of Kirill Serebrennikov overstuffed Lohengrin for the Opéra Bastille. By the banks of the river Scheldt, the orphaned Lady Elsa of Brabant stands accused of fratricide. Just when all seems lost, a white knight materializes in a skiff drawn by a magnificent swan, to which—first things first—the knight bids a loving farewell. Rapt, the accused lip-syncs along.

1 month ago | airmail.news | Matthew Gurewitsch

In the bazaar of content and ideas that churns out apps for everything, it totally computes that William Shakespeare should have his outlets, and so he has, many. The app Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which has been around since 2012, incorporates the authoritative Arden Shakespeare text with notes and commentaries, plus a facsimile of the original quarto, published in London by Thomas Thorpe in 1609; no manuscript material survives.

1 month ago | airmail.news | Matthew Gurewitsch

This just in from Melissa Errico. “Awful facts, right? I know all about it. But I was as shocked as you.” We’ve been trading emails about the 369th Infantry Regiment, known as the Harlem Hellfighters, who served in W.W. I under the Tricolore in French uniform, because the segregated U.S. Army barred Black units from mixing with whites. Those Hellfighters lived up to their name. One of them, a former rail station porter from Albany, New York, was the first American honored with the Croix de Guerre.

1 month ago | airmail.news | Matthew Gurewitsch

The pianist Hunter Noack, 36, is taking the road less traveled by, and that makes all the difference. As the founder and star attraction of “In a Landscape: Classical Music in the Wild,” inaugurated in 2016, Noack will be concertizing from May to September in Pacific Northwest and West Coast wildernesses, where weather can whiplash in a heartbeat. Fortunately, as a native Oregonian, he’s an outdoorsman for all seasons.

2 months ago | airmail.news | Matthew Gurewitsch

Who lives, who dies, who tells your story? In 1942, the insurance executive Emil Freund of Prague perished miserably in the Polish ghetto of Łódź, sent there to die by the Nazis. Jump cut to 2001, when an unsuspecting Viet Nam vet named Gerald McDonald, living in Lyons, Illinois, and raised Lutheran, learns that he is the rightful heir to the modern art collection of a Jewish great-great-uncle.