Culinary possibilities have enormously improved since I originally arrived in Munich (directly from two years in Paris yet) 56 years ago last fall. During my five Munich years my frustrated gourmet’s heart leapt up when the Guide Michelin itself, which I’ve sometimes thought of as perhaps the only incorruptible institution in la douce France, [...]
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[This afternoon at the Komische Oper zu Berlin, the American baritone Kevin Deas sang this captivating little song Aaron Copland adapted as one of his "Old American Songs", and when I got home I emailed him this addendum:]
Dear Mr. Deas,
as Berlin correspondent for www.MusicalAmerica.com I attended - and enjoyed - your concert this afternoon at [...]
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[From my hard disk I've excavated some Stockhauseniana I put together in 1998, which has definitely not lost its relevance to this inordinately intricate personality:]
Although Karlheinz Stockhausen at 70 has probably become globally the most famous living German composer (his only rival: Hans Werner Henze), comparatively few people actually know his music. During the early [...]
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Howard Pollack’s 690-page biography Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man documents in some detail (the index cites me seven times) one of my life’s most enriching friendships with that almost saintly man, which began soon after I emerged from the University of Texas at 19 as a brand-new Bachelor Musicae and [...]
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Young Mailer’s first novel The Naked and the Dead turned him into an overnight celebrity but it appeared early enough for its publisher to have serious problems with a pungent monosyllable that peppered the manuscript. Mailer had written naturalistically about the robust young Americans in uniform he’d known during World War II, and for him [...]
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The online magazine salon has scored some notable coups in the field of investigative journalism, but I recall none that’s so impressed and inexpressibly horrified me as this one, about the barbarous torture euphemistically called “waterboarding”, which the Bush-Cheney criminal conspiracy not only condones and practises but also inexorably defends as indispensable “under present circumstances”.
What [...]
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I believe I told at least some of you at one point or another that although I’ve long since collected the handsome certificate (now beautifully framed, for a prominent place on the wall of my Berlin apartment’s entry hall) proclaiming me a citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany, the formal ceremony for us Neudeutsche [...]
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From an unimpeachable, totally reliable source I have this latest shaming tidbit of barbarous stateside yahoo nitwittery towards distinguished visiting foreign artists in the fatuous name of “security”, a sacrosanct word which for the incumbent criminal administration apparently excuses no matter what indignities.
The Berlin Philharmonic, billed by Carnegie Hall for four concerts with its conductor [...]
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As a reputable musical journalist of several decades’ high-level experience, I almost invariably avoid even mentioning sources I feel I must, for whatever reason, leave anonymous, but I feel strongly that this present instance justifies such an exception.
On October 8th, a New York Times article under James R. Oestreich’s byline led off with this:
“Opening the [...]
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Back during the period when German television strove mightily to adopt and adapt the lucrative magic formula that had created such American advertising bonanzas as the pioneer talk shows of Jack Paar, Dick Cavett, et al., I once with stricken eyes watched Cavett’s interview, conducted in Cologne by the Westdeutscher Rundfunk’s chief honcho Werner Höfer [...]
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