Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:44:15 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Stuart Isacoff :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/Stuart+Isacoff istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us STUART ISACOFF http://www.nysun.com/arts/beast-who-became-an-opera/35665/ Mon, 10 Jul 2006 00:00:00 EST Even monsters have mothers. That message is at the heart of John Gardner's 1971 novel "Grendel," a reshaping of the 10th-century Danish tale, "Beowulf." While that epic is named for the warrior-hero who slays a murderous beast, Mr. Gardner's story is told from the point of view of the beast, Grendel. And in his novel, the repulsive, Dane-eating monster appears more recognizably human than any of the stiff-necked, blinkered men who seek his demise. It's a fascinating perspective. But bringing... STUART ISACOFF http://www.nysun.com/arts/master-speaks-and-plays/23587/ Mon, 28 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EST A century ago, before the world was so flat, national styles of music making were a given.The French school of pianism, for example, was known for its fleet technique and lyrical delicacy - the aural equivalent, perhaps, of the nation's haute cuisine. German playing was a weightier and less nuanced affair: Think meat and potatoes, hold the schlag. In a discussion of these differences some years ago, the American composer Ned Rorem offered a useful comparison: French music, he explained, is... STUART ISACOFF http://www.nysun.com/arts/best-of-cortots-recorded-legacy/23594/ Mon, 28 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EST Alfred Cortot produced more than 150 recordings in the 1920s and 1930s alone and sometimes went back into the studios to revisit the same works. This can create confusion when searching for the best among the many Cortot reissues. He made three versions of the Chopin Preludes, for example, but the 1933 recording was certainly his finest. To help sort things out, I asked three experts for their recommendations. Jerome Lowenthal is a former Cortot student who teaches piano at the Juilliard... STUART ISACOFF http://www.nysun.com/arts/real-bach-at-leipzig/23052/ Tue, 15 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EST "Bach at Leipzig," Itamar Moses's farce about an 18th-century contest among seven musicians vying for a post in Leipzig left open by the death of Johann Kuhnau - a position eventually filled by Johann Sebastian Bach - brings to mind a cartoon drawing I saw several years ago. In it, the venerable Bach is attempting to compose at home amid the ruckus of children chasing each other around the room and a wife screaming from the kitchen, "Johann - take out the garbage!" That idea of bringing... STUART ISACOFF http://www.nysun.com/arts/three-pianists-and-an-orchestra/20157/ Mon, 19 Sep 2005 00:00:00 EST According to Zarin Mehta, the New York Philharmonic's president and executive director, the decision to open the season with three concert programs featuring rising stars of the piano world - Russian virtuoso Evgeny Kissin, China's Lang Lang, and American Jonathan Biss - was serendipitous. "It's just a matter of logistics," he told me. "These things depend on when the artists are available." Nevertheless, the coming weeks offer a fascinating opportunity to glimpse the direction of classical... STUART ISACOFF http://www.nysun.com/arts/wolfgangs-italian-connection/18202/ Mon, 8 Aug 2005 00:00:00 EST Mozart's parents, in search of fame and fortune, began taking their prodigy on tour through Europe in 1762, even before he had reached his sixth birthday. There were visits to Germany, France, England, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. They sojourned to Italy three times in the early 1770s. At a preconcert lecture at Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival last week, musicologist Peter A. Hoyt reminded us about just how treacherous travel could be at that time. On land, there were "impassable... STUART ISACOFF http://www.nysun.com/arts/home-for-the-lively-as-well-as-the-lovely-arts/16122/ Mon, 27 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EST Tuvan throat singing is a rarity in New York. But sung artfully in ensemble as it was recently at the Rubin Museum in Chelsea by Chirgilchin, the throat-singing champions of Tuva, a Central Asian nation on the border of Mongolia, the musical technique can be mesmerizingly beautiful. In this art form, a singer uses his or her vocal tract to generate sounds that range from the impossibly low to the astoundingly high - often simultaneously. That is, a single performer may produce at once both a... STUART ISACOFF http://www.nysun.com/arts/new-art-of-the-lecture-recital/12844/ Tue, 26 Apr 2005 00:00:00 EST Pianist Andre Watts has been one of America's most celebrated classical artists since the day, at the age of 16, he was chosen by Leonard Bernstein to debut with the New York Philharmonic in a nationally broadcast Young People's Concert. His performance of the Liszt E Flat Concerto was so electrifying that two weeks later, when Glenn Gould canceled his scheduled appearance with the orchestra, Mr. Watts was invited to substitute for him. The event became the storybook launch of a truly... STUART ISACOFF http://www.nysun.com/arts/bach-mozart-radiohead/12794/ Mon, 25 Apr 2005 00:00:00 EST The graying of audiences at venerable music institutions has been a worrisome trend for quite some time, and solutions are hard to come by. In a culture that favors ephemeral sensation over works that have met the test of time, classical organizations struggle to attract new, young listeners. Postmodernism has given great impetus to blending popular and traditional elements in the arts, but songs by the rock band Radiohead are still unlikely to grace a New York Philharmonic program anytime soon... STUART ISACOFF http://www.nysun.com/arts/renaissance-musician/12029/ Mon, 11 Apr 2005 00:00:00 EST In recent years musicologists have raised questions about the possibility of achieving "authenticity" in the performance of early music. Musical minds, they assert, are fashioned by their own time; you can't go home again. Yet Spanish viola da gambist Jordi Savall has taken up residence in the 16th and 17th centuries with seemingly unaffected ease. The unlikely result has been musical stardom. Mr. Savall was launched to prominence in 1991, when he played on the soundtrack of the film "All the... STUART ISACOFF http://www.nysun.com/arts/orchestra-builder/11248/ Mon, 28 Mar 2005 00:00:00 EST The job of conductor used to be both simpler and more dangerous. In the late 17th century, when composer Jean-Baptiste Lully conducted his "Te Deum" in a French church, the role was chiefly one of beating time for an ensemble. Lully beat it with a stick, accidentally struck his foot, and died three months later of gangrene. But timekeeping is only the most primitive aspect of an art that has grown to include the direction of all aspects of a performance, from tempo and dynamics to details of... STUART ISACOFF http://www.nysun.com/arts/listening-again-to-bachs-st-matthew-passion-with/9899/ Tue, 1 Mar 2005 00:00:00 EST It's difficult to picture the greatest composer of all time as a harried employee, struggling to haul his magnificent creations up a mountain of bureaucratic indifference. Yet the few letters left behind by Johann Sebastian Bach reflect just that picture; more often than not, they are pleadings for a better position or for compensation promised. His attempts to secure a more favorable situation - as in 1717, when he abandoned Weimar for an offer in Cothen - actually landed him in jail. By late... STUART ISACOFF http://www.nysun.com/arts/endowments-of-the-arts/9233/ Tue, 15 Feb 2005 00:00:00 EST What does it take these days for an accomplished classical musician to gain public recognition? Apparently, something well beyond great music-making. Last year, I received a promotional mailing from a major record label describing a highly talented violinist on their roster as a "sex kitten." And how is her intonation? I wondered. I'm not oblivious to the physical attractions of musical artists. But I feel a bit nostalgic for a time when the term "natural endowments" was meant to convey a... STUART ISACOFF http://www.nysun.com/arts/work-that-harnesses-natures-harmonies/8850/ Mon, 7 Feb 2005 00:00:00 EST From would-be cultural pundits to desperate music marketers, nearly everyone in the arts grapples with the question: What is the next big thing? Looking back seldom provides answers. Where were the clues that might have predicted the shimmering brush strokes of Impressionism or the stark allure of atonality as composers transcended the habits of their time? Yet it's hard to keep from guessing, and from noting when something sounds genuinely new. Michael Harrison's 90-minute "Revelation," which... STUART ISACOFF http://www.nysun.com/arts/reading-mozarts-mind/7455/ Mon, 10 Jan 2005 00:00:00 EST Everyone loves a good mystery. We are captivated both by an unsolved riddle and the brilliant sleuthing that leads to its solution. If Sherlock Holmes seemed to know more than he should have - the country of origin of the tobacco in a heap of cigar ashes, or the trials of Dr. Watson's late brother based solely on the pocket watch he wore - the explanation was elementary. Holmes simply engaged in a higher level of observation and clear-headed reasoning than the rest of us. In the world of... STUART ISACOFF http://www.nysun.com/arts/world-on-a-string/7166/ Tue, 4 Jan 2005 00:00:00 EST Ludwig van Beethoven's three "Rasumovsky" string quartets, composed in autumn 1806 and dedicated to the Russian ambassador to Vienna, were so boldly original that the players who first performed them believed they were the butt of a joke. Muzio Clementi, the composer and pianist who had once been described by Mozart as a "mere mechanician," asked Beethoven if he really considered them music. "Oh, they are not for you, but for a later age," he replied. The story appears in Donald Grout's classic... STUART ISACOFF http://www.nysun.com/arts/finding-beauty-in-loss/5556/ Tue, 30 Nov 2004 00:00:00 EST John Cage once stated, "One way to write music: study Duchamp." When Marcel Duchamp submitted his now-famous "Fountain" to the Armory Show in 1917, he met with rejection by the committee in charge. The urinal to which Duchamp had affixed the fictitious signature, "R. Mutt" seemed no more than a silly joke, a pie in the face of art's power brokers. Yet the sensibility at its core would exert a profound influence on many other artists, including John Cage and Philip Glass. Duchamp's enduring idea... STUART ISACOFF http://www.nysun.com/arts/vivaldi-or-not-vivaldi-is-that-the-question/5496/ Mon, 29 Nov 2004 00:00:00 EST The rush to trumpet a recently unearthed Venetian serenata as the creation of famed composer Antonio Vivaldi has provoked a small fracas within the early music community. Some claim that it is, others that it isn't (though one aria, "Sovvente il sole," is indisputably Vivaldi, since it can be found elsewhere in his output). The flare-up has at least provided some marketable intrigue for the Venice Baroque Orchestra, which, after having recorded the serenata, "Andromeda liberata" (Andromeda... STUART ISACOFF http://www.nysun.com/arts/acolyte/4094/ Mon, 1 Nov 2004 00:00:00 EST J.M. Coetzee, the Nobel Prize-winning author, has written of a boring summer afternoon in 1955 when, as a 15-year-old in Cape Town, he was frozen in his tracks by the musical sounds emanating from a neighbor's house. "I dared not breathe," he remembered. "I was being spoken to by the music as music had never spoken to me before." The work was Johann Sebastian Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier." That afternoon in the garden, he declared, "everything changed." Mr. Coetzee is hardly alone among those... STUART ISACOFF http://www.nysun.com/arts/brahms-the-beleaguered/3016/ Mon, 11 Oct 2004 00:00:00 EST We often hear of him as one of the three Bs, a pillar, along with Bach and Beethoven, of the Western musical canon. Yet he was a controversial figure from the start, and just a few decades ago many composers and scholars were still reserving judgment on Johannes Brahms (1833-97). Little wonder: His first and most devoted supporter, Robert Schumann (1810-56), called him "another John the Baptist, whose revelations will puzzle many of the Pharisees, and every one else, for centuries." Many who... STUART ISACOFF http://www.nysun.com/arts/discovering-leonard-bernstein/1657/ Tue, 14 Sep 2004 00:00:00 EST It's difficult to think of a figure in the annals of American classical music more glamorous than Leonard Bernstein: conductor, composer, pianist, teacher, and media celebrity. Though gone for more than a decade now, he is still a household name. Yet the man remains as mystifying as ever. None of the biographical writings has managed to pin him down. No critical appraisal of his work - much of it negative during his lifetime - comes close to being the final word. His name may be universally... STUART ISACOFF http://www.nysun.com/arts/mozart-by-way-of-persia/739/ Tue, 24 Aug 2004 00:00:00 EST In a letter from Rome in April of 1770, Leopold Mozart, father of the composer, reported to his wife on his son's latest musical triumph. "You have no doubt often heard of the famous Miserere, which is so highly treasured that the musicians of the Chapel are forbidden, under pain of excommunication, to take a single part out of the Chapel, to copy it, or to give it to anyone," he wrote. "We now have it: Wolfgang wrote it down." The note illuminates two attributes that characterized the genius... STUART ISACOFF http://www.nysun.com/arts/caught-in-the-act/299/ Mon, 16 Aug 2004 00:00:00 EST Musician and philosopher David Burrows once compared a musical score to a dried cod. After all, the dots, squiggles, and stripes that parade across a page of music manuscript are mere suggestions of the real thing. And though some of us, in the absence of an actual performance, can imagine the sounds that they represent, real music is an entirely different animal: visceral, energetic, and, at its best, succulent - like a properly prepared cod. The alchemical process that changes musical...