The Metropolitan Opera House in New York City has issued its first “trigger warning” for Puccini’s 1926 opera, Turandot, which takes place in ancient Peking, China. Here’s the full warning, written by Christopher Bronwer, the Met’s associate editor: We must also consider the…
There’s a fatal temptation with Lent. Few people struggle to come up with a list of things to “give up” — and frequently those lists are quite long with items like sweets, carbs, TV shows, genres of music, and so…
In the last eight or nine years, it’s felt to many Americans as if the country has changed very dramatically, if not irreversibly. A century ago, our forebears had a similar feeling. In 2016, Donald Trump was elected president and…
Last weekend marked the second week of Advent, a time of hope when Christians await the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ, on Christmas Day. Young people are more readily anticipating the material rewards of the holiday, even those well…
Their tiny fingers fly up and down the keyboard eight hours a day and their fearsome dedication shows no sign of abating. These young piano students from China, South Korea, and Japan are driven by cultural and economic forces now…
MUNICH — I recently had the pleasure of visiting this German city for a weekend of music, museums, and multiple servings of beer and sausage. My first stop was Münchner Stubn (Bayerstrasse 35). This eatery is immediately across from the…
WASHINGTON — Last week in this space I wrote about culture and how essential it is to the politics of a nation. If the culture of a country is upbeat, the country will be fine. If the culture of a…
What do we possess today as “art”? A faked music, filled with artificial noisiness of massed instruments; a failed painting, full of idiotic, exotic and showcard effects, that every ten years or so concocts out of the form-wealth of millennia…
Valery Gergiev is famous for two things. First, according to music critics who supposedly know about such things, he’s a world-class symphony conductor. Second, he’s a close buddy (for some three decades now) of Vladimir Putin, whose 2014 annexation of…
This October saw the Covid-delayed staging of one of the world’s most prestigious piano competitions, the 18th Chopin Competition, originally to have been held in February and March of 2020. It honors anew Poland’s national composer, the nonpareil composer of…