With the New Cold War heating up, and American citizens under siege at home, it’s no small wonder that a Russian named Berlin can still claim to have composed this nation’s best-loved song. Born in…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
There’s little to laugh at in 2026. Yet humor is more vital than ever, even if comic barbs and palliatives aren’t enough to stop the U.S. invasion of Greenland. Ironically, insane American adventures stock the…
Hildegard Knef would have celebrated her 100th birthday on December 28 just passed. Given the number of cigarettes she smoked (Marlboros, three packs a day), the years she spent addicted to morphine (nearly twenty) as…
Seen from within its courtyard off busy Euston Road in London, the British Library is meant to look like a stately ocean liner pulling out to sea against the gables, turrets, and clock tower of…
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, now at the Sam Wanamaker Theatre on London’s Southbank, might seem to make for oddly out-of-season fare. Yet the play itself conjures calendric confusion and climate catastrophe. In the midst…
The Christian church year begins on the first Sunday of Advent, which falls either in late November or early December. Many traditions mark the occasion with festive pomp as befits a New Year celebration: organ…
Bach is back, bigger than ever and just in time for the holiday buying season in this 275th year since his death. The bicenterquasquigenary Bach buzz reached a frenzied fortissimo after last week’s officially sanctioned—not…
A conductor waves his arms in front of other musicians. The audience usually sees the maestro (less often maestra, still) from the back. Hidden from the concertgoers during the performance, the conductor’s face can convey…
Nature makes music—the wind, the waves, the rain, the rustle of leaves, the creak and complaint of trees. The human impulse to transform these sounds into something that might be called Automatic Art spawned the…