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4 days ago | 
newcriterion.com | Robert Erickson |Douglas Murray |Suzanna Murawski |Emma Richards
Nonfiction:Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, by Laura Spinney (Bloomsbury): The peak of Babeldom was probably realized during the Neolithic Age, “the moment in the human story,” as Laura Spinney notes in her new book Proto, “when more languages were spoken than at any other”—when a worldwide population in the tens of millions talked in as many as fifteen thousand different tongues.
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1 week ago | 
newcriterion.com | Paul du Quenoy |Robert Erickson |Andrew Shea |Suzanna Murawski
The San Franciso Symphony’s season is ending better than it started, though the conclusion is bittersweet with the all-too-soon departure of its music director, Esa-Pekka Salonen, the award-winning Finnish conductor and composer who has led the orchestra since 2020.
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1 week ago | 
newcriterion.com | Suzanna Murawski |Robert Erickson |Andrew Shea |Douglas Murray
Recent stories of note:“Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein”Matt Dinan, The Hedgehog ReviewWhen Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein was published twenty-five years ago, it was widely lambasted as, in the words of one critic, a “shockingly bad” memoir of “cruel violations” for revealing unsavory private details about the scholar Allan Bloom, upon whom the novel’s character Abe Ravelstein was based. But if you look a little closer, the correspondence is not so one-to-one.
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1 week ago | 
newcriterion.com | Andrew Shea |Douglas Murray |Suzanna Murawski |Roger Kimball
Nonfiction:Gustav Mahler, by Stephen Downes (Reaktion Books):Goethe, Wagner, Nietzsche: these are fairly well-known influences on the music and thought of Gustav Mahler. Fewer know, I’d wager, that Mahler was an avid reader of Laurence Sterne’s digressive free-for-all Tristram Shandy, or of E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose Tomcat Murr is a similarly whimsical novel purporting to be the memoirs of a cat accidentally shuffled with a Mahleresque composer’s biography.
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Dec 20, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Suzanna Murawski
Recent stories of note:“Rousseau and the American Electorate”David Lewis Schaeffer, Law & Liberty“Profoundly original, profoundly influential, and profoundly dangerous”—these accolades were awarded by Roger Scruton in an October 1998 essay for The New Criterion to the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who is often blamed for the excesses of the French Revolution and other such utopian projects.
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Dec 13, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Suzanna Murawski
Recent stories of note:“The Novels That Made Us”Valerie Stivers, CompactIs the novel going the way of the dinosaurs? One of its great exponents, Edwin Frank, the founder and editor of the NYRB Classics series, suggests as much in his new book. It’s called Stranger than Fiction, and in it, Frank recounts the development of the twentieth-century novel through a series of chapters on thirty-odd books. Running from Dostoevsky’s 1864 Notes from the Underground all the way to W. G.
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Nov 1, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Douglas Murray |James Piereson |Hilton Kramer |Suzanna Murawski
Recent stories of note:“Hear a Chopin Waltz Unearthed After Nearly 200 Years”Javier C. Hernández, The New York TimesFrédéric Chopin died 175 years ago, so it’s not too often that his fans get to hear something new from him.
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Sep 26, 2023 | 
newcriterion.com | Suzanna Murawski
One doesn’t generally head into Manhattan for a sylvan retreat. But such pleasant sanctuary is provided by “Into the Woods: French Drawings and Photographs from the Karen B. Cohen Gift” at the Morgan Library & Museum. The exhibition, featuring images of the Fontainebleau Forest by such Barbizon School masters as Camille Corot and Théodore Rousseau, debuts a recent gift to the museum alongside a handful of works already in the Morgan’s collection.
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Sep 25, 2023 | 
newcriterion.com | Suzanna Murawski
The Swiss artist Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918) adhered to a philosophy he termed “parallelism”: the belief that repetition and pattern intensify experience, serving as a source of revelation; separate objects become unified as they mirror each other, and this unity is the highest end of art.
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Aug 14, 2023 | 
newcriterion.com | Suzanna Murawski
The Dallas Museum of Art’s “Saints, Sinners, Lovers, and Fools: 300 Years of Flemish Masterworks” boasts over one hundred thirty Flemish artworks, some indeed masterly, albeit displayed against jewel-toned walls that never quite let the objects speak for themselves. Organized in conjunction with the Denver Art Museum and Antwerp’s Phoebus Foundation, the traveling exhibition debuts the Phoebus Foundation’s collection in the States.
