“John Adams...may be the most vital and eloquent composer in America.”
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“An American artist’s Wanderjahre for our time... John Adams is a superb writer.”
Watch Gustavo Dudamel conduct ‘City Noir’.
Download: City Noir is available as an iTunes download starting May 11.
Windbag
Jul 07, 2010My mother’s family was half Irish, and my memory of family gatherings is full of the same kind of gab and repartee that I find in the Aeolus chapter of “Ulysses.” The Catholic Church is never far offstage. One moment it’s the butt of scurrilous humor, and then a minute later it becomes the source of a sudden seizure of piety.
12 Comments Continue ReadingEl Tanguero
Jun 27, 2010What impresses most about Astor Piazzolla is the extraordinary clarity of his thought. He could be brutal—just like the counterpoint exercises Nadia Boulanger assigned him —but his musical and intellectual mental processes were both profoundly absorptive and shrewdly practical. In this way he was much like his idol, Stravinsky.
5 Comments Continue ReadingThe Perpetual Orgy
Jun 22, 2010How to write a masterpiece? I haven’t a clue, but if a young composer were to ask me that question on this particular day I would unhesitatingly direct him or her to “The Perpetual Orgy” by Mario Vargas Llosa.
11 Comments Continue ReadingThe Adulteress
Jun 16, 2010In the last few weeks I read “Madame Bovary” twice—in English, which I’m passably good at. I can’t say that of any novel I’ve ever read—that I’ve wanted to go right back to page one and do it all over again. I now understand why Nabokov says you haven’t really read a book if you’ve just read it once.
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