Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

Something that happened in - and over - the small German city of Braunschweig (pop. 260,000) last week has plunged me into some long, long thoughts about this musical phenomenon, who since shortly after World War II has held rank at the very top echelon of the hard-core, most uncompromising musical avant-garde.  You might, as [...]

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Two things during the past 24 hours have taken me on a backward stroll down my own personal German political Memory Lane.  Last night a hard-hitting television documentary (from our classy tri-national German-language satellite network 3sat) took an exceptionally sharp look at the neuralgic issue of old Nazis in positions of power after the postwar establishment of [...]

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This astonishing video has the title “The Four-Finger Pianist”.  I did not find it easy to watch, and probably neither at first will you, but what I heard so fascinated me that I forced myself, to my very definite benefit and enlightenment. 
I took it for granted that “The Four-Finger Pianist” meant four fingers on [...]

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Excavated from June 4th (with me still struggling to whup this damned blog technology to the mat), this excerpt from my long-suffering, much put-upon father substitute Perry (a.k.a. St. Perry) Nelson:
” . . . I enjoyed reading these reminiscences of the times you spent with Rostropovich. Such an intimate portrait as emerges here provides a [...]

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During my San Francisco years (1982-95), “Time” once began its report on an election there with this sentence: “San Francisco is a tree-house for adult delinquents.” 
I believe that story reported the November 1982 election that listed one candidate for the city’s Board of Supervisors as Sister Boom-Boom, with the explanatory addendum one line lower “Nun [...]

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This extraordinary videoclip blew in from a thoughtful friend with the Dallas Symphony, accompanied by various peripheral speculations about this demon violinist who - seemingly on the spur of the moment - improvises the damnedest cadenza imaginable for one of the pillars of the strictly Classical repertoire, Mozart’s third Violin Concerto, in G. I needed [...]

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I’d like to call your attention to what I’ve come to regard as the best Anglophone newsmagazine coverage anywhere (click here) - and it comes from neither the USA nor the UK but from the northwest German port city-state of Hamburg.  Soon after World War II ended in 1945, a budding journalistic genius named Rudolf [...]

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Technorati Tags: Van Cliburn, Kent Nagano, Thomas Quasthoff, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Ernest Fleischmann, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Gustavo Dudamel
The quotation marks above around “discovering” result from the frequent misuse of that term; for instance, hadn’t “the new world” already existed for quite a while prior to 1492?  At the moment I think of one of the primary joys of [...]

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{I’ve exhumed this from fifteen years ago, written in San Francisco three years before I returned to Berlin, revived here especially for Christine von Grafenstein, who wrote so kindly about my experience a week ago when two homicidal crows divebombed Maxe the Dauntless Dachshund and me.}  

November 6, 1992
Misha My Love
From the very beginning, [...]

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Berlin’s mercury stands at 88 degrees (F.) for the second of three forecast days, so I’ll make this little Sunday supplement short and (I hope) sweet.
The almost innumerable reasons this wonderful Berlin has long since become my all-time favorite city in the entire world (after leisurely samplings of such other inferior burgs as New York, [...]

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