Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

When I went over into eastern Berlin Sunday night to cover a premiere at the grand old State Opera on Berlin’s showpiece boulevard named Unter den Linden (because of the quadruple columns of trees marching down the center separator green strip, I had to take the subterranean U-Bahn because yesterday I got a call from [...]

Read Full Post »

The innumerable cross-connections over the course of my eighty-three years sometimes take even me by surprise.  The other evening here in Berlin I dined with a Swiss-born Californian and member of the Cal Tech faculty in Pasadena, Andreas Aebi, I’ve cherished as a friend for thirty-five years now – and my subsequent Skype-talking about that [...]

Read Full Post »

I plan for the imminent future a little stroll down this particular geographic and psychological stretch of my personal Memory Lane derived from the first sixteen years of my life, spent in my birthplace El Paso (where you could walk across the international bridge over the sometimes totally dry “Silvery Rio Grande” into Los Estados [...]

Read Full Post »

Thanks to a bit of virtuoso clipboardery I’ve whupped this philologically challenged provincial Californian software into replicating that pesky Danish/Norwegian fifth letter of Aksel Schiøtz’s surname, but in order to confuse and frustrate Googlers and surfers as little as possible I want, prophylactically, to zing in a version that’ll at least make this bloggery noticeable [...]

Read Full Post »

[Several fans of Richter - does my personal involvement distort my own impression that the music world, especially music-lovers, have meanwhile come around to regarding him as the preëminent pianist of his time? - have for years urged me to make generally available again the story of his reunion with his mother the summer of [...]

Read Full Post »

For not years but decades I’ve intended to research the transformation into this famous pianist-teacher from li’l ol’ Lucie Hickenlooper, born in li’l ol’ San Antone Texas, and my recent stroll down Memory Lane in tribute to her Juilliard pupil William Kapell has finally, finally goosed me into doing it.  In 1958, Time-Life International sent [...]

Read Full Post »

[For some time now, I've had a short book of very personal memoirs about the great Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter on my mind, and my blogfather Perry Nelson, the sage and techno-wizard of Knoxville, Tennessee, has done his best to pound it into my head that I'd do the really hip thing if I'd get [...]

Read Full Post »

Mention the little un-iced pastry known in France as une madeleine and anyone familiar with literature thinks immediately of Marcel Proust, whom the sight and taste of a madeleine dipped in tea launched on a protracted stroll down his own Memory Lane that gave the world the great multi-volume autobiographical novel for which he borrowed [...]

Read Full Post »

During my years as a gung-ho Parisian Left-Banker (1949-51) – complete with full beard, beret basque, British Army surplus duffel-coat, and a grungy little walk-up hotel room that cost me $1 a night at those days’ black-market rate (and where, the New York girl who’d preceded me to Paris and got me installed there assured [...]

Read Full Post »

During my New York years (until I fled the country in 1949 at the age of 25) I frequently read the admirable New York Post because of its status as the only truly liberal daily newspaper in town.  Deplorably, as so frequently happens in the U.S. media world, some unperson eventually bought it and turned [...]

Read Full Post »