Claudio Abbado was conducting Mussorgsky right next to the Dave Brubeck Quintet. The collision made crazy, coincidental sense, a compelling mash-up: Taking Five on Bald Mountain. Nearby, Elly Ameling sang Bach while leaning on a…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
The evening light was a sickly sepia. The haze from the wildfires gave the clapboard houses on the steep hillside above one of Ithaca’s many gorges a simultaneously antique and apocalyptic cast. Down below in…
In Christian art across the centuries, angels have been depicted playing musical instruments: harps, trumpets, and organs. But how is it possible for immaterial beings to hold objects of wood, metal, string and wire? Theologians…
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…
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…