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Jan 14, 2025 | 
nysmusic.com | Pat Rogers
On a cold winter’s night in Albany, music fans were treated to an unforgettable celebration of life, talent, and legacy at the TP Birthday Celebration Concert, at Lark Hall – held in honor of Tom Pirozzi (TP), bass player for Ominous Seapods, Raisinhead and the Deadbeats – the premier Capital District Grateful Dead Tribute band. The event was a fitting tribute to an artist who has shaped the local music scene for decades.
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Dec 6, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | James Nuechterlein |Emily Smith |Douglas Murray |Pat Rogers
Recent stories of note:“Lines of Insight”Stephen Smith, Literary ReviewPiet Mondrian is known, of course, for his red, yellow, and blue. And after he made the switch from Post-Impressionism to De Stijl, he apparently stuck to his guns: during the Blitz, when friends told him to flee London and head to the country, he replied, “It is too green.” A new biography tells the story of the idiosyncratic artist whose life, unlike Van Gogh or Caravaggio, has yet to capture the public imagination.
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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 3, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Emily Smith |Douglas Murray |Theodore Dalrymple |Pat Rogers
Poetry:Samantha Rose Hill on What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt at the Strand Bookstore, New York (December 11): Hannah Arendt courted controversy for as long as she wrote—and continued to do so well after her death in 1975. Her Origins of Totalitarianism garnered criticism for assigning partial responsibility to European Jewry for anti-Semitism on the continent.
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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 20, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | James Nuechterlein |Emily Smith |Douglas Murray |Pat Rogers
Frederick Seidel’s poems have been cranky, preposterous, but almost never stale, flat, or unprofitable. He enjoys that rare ability to surprise you with lines immediately memorable, yet unlike anyone else’s:Days of snow padded the sparking silence—still 1955—Of my friend’s Princeton dorm, empty at Christmas,No one around, the sound of Bach from somewhere,The smell of snow still falling, snow in my nostrils,Snow outside the windowsMy breath steamed up,A foghorn of silence inflaming the air.
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Nov 20, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | James Nuechterlein |Emily Smith |Douglas Murray |Pat Rogers
Like its predecessor dedicated to a summer with Montaigne, Antoine Compagnon’s lively and charming A Summer with Pascal originated as a series on French radio. It is a work of haute vulgarisation, that is, of popularization informed by competency and erudition. It is written in admirably clear and elegant prose. Its author, Antoine Compagnon, is a member of the Académie française as well as a professor of French and comparative literature at Columbia University (and a Proust scholar of some note).
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Nov 20, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | James Nuechterlein |Emily Smith |Douglas Murray |Pat Rogers
Virginia Nicholson is the veteran author of several enjoyable social histories of twentieth-century Britain.
