Patrick Mackie

Jul 28, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Patrick Mackie

Birmingham’s city centre jags around the site where the manor house of the De Birmingham family once stood, though little now remains even of the great Smithfield livestock market that the 19th century threw down in its place. There’s a summer funfair there now, but in the second week of July the Birmingham Opera Company used the space to stage Michael Tippett’s radiant, hectic opera New Year.

Jul 17, 2023 | newyorkfolk.com | James White |Patrick Mackie

One of my favorite passages in all of Mozart sounds nothing like him. In the opening bars of his String Quartet No. 19 in C Major, quiet notes from the violins and violas ooze over the halting pulse of the cello. At times, sounds coalesce into weird dissonances as parts seem to grope, perhaps instinctually, toward harmony. Then a tense pause—and a jaunty melody bursts forth as if released by a spring.

Jul 14, 2023 | msn.com | Patrick Mackie

By Peter Shaffer (1979) 1. It was a stroke of genius for Peter Shaffer to write a play about genius and feature at its heart a character of mediocre talent. But then the point of his Salieri is the destructive intensity with which the arrival of Mozart in 1780s Vienna exposes that mediocrity. Salieri is sickeningly aware of the tyro’s superiority; “Amadeus” also makes the older composer the most penetrating admirer of Mozart’s music all while becoming his monstrous enemy.

Jul 14, 2023 | wsj.com | Patrick Mackie

‘English Tea Served in the Salon des Quatre-Glaces at the Temple Palace’ (1766) by Michel-Barthélémy Ollivier, with a 9-year-old Mozart sitting at the harpsichord.

Jun 29, 2023 | boomers-daily.com | Sarah Hart |Patrick Mackie |Rebecca Struthers

Wall Street Journal Books & Art (June 28, 2023) – A country music outsider’s journey, the uprising that tested a young America, the true story of a psychotherapy cult and more standouts from the month in books. Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality From Camp Meeting to Wall StreetBy Jackson Lears Shaw’s life force, Freud’s libido, Bergson’s ‘élan vital’—all are expressions of a spark that eludes the control of civilized modernity. Review by Jeremy McCarter.