Across most of its four-hundred-year history, opera has been predominantly an urban pursuit. It flourished in Italian cities—Florence, Mantua, Venice, Naples—then was exported to the rest of Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries and…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
Pain is gain, all the way up towards 20,000 RPM, music to the ears, the urgent advice of audiologist be damned. Even in the marginally quieter age of hybrid Formula 1 cars that dawned against…
Summer is the time of family reunions. The big Bach family and had big family reunions, full of fun and music. So reported Johan Sebastian Bach’s first biographer, Johann Nickolaus Forkel, writing a half century…
We saw her hanging from lamp posts all over Paris—one of those women from a 19th-century Japanese woodcut, her hair pinned up in a two-tiered bun, her kimono adorned with prints of branches bearing buds…
In front of the Horniman Museum in the leafy Forest Hill district of London stands a weathered Tlingit totem pole. It is loomed over by the museum’s squat-yet-somehow-also-lofty clocktower and regarded from behind with neo-medieval…
In America, everything is possible, even Mission Impossible. Especially Mission Impossible. The theme music proclaims it. Bursting out of a high tremolo like a fuse burning fast, the opening trombone-heavy groove is jaunty yet resolute.…
The suburbs are a war zone. That was how the General saw things. He was my aunt’s father-in-law. I met him only a handful of times over the years, mostly at family celebrations, like my…