It just kept rolling along, painting always unpredictable, always alluring patterns on its surface, caressing the embankment, gracefully sliding through the shadows under bridges, not giving a French fig about the humongous fascist-inspired spectacle rampaging…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
Often when I practice the organ I’m immersed in the immediacy of each successive moment of music-making. Act and sound conjoin in the uninterrupted present. The best concert performances remain in that heightened state, but…
The country singer Lee Greenwood was born three weeks before Joe Biden. A self-styled evangelical Christian Republican, Greenwood is a wiry octogenarian, well-spoken and exuding a fiery intelligence. At 81, he pursues a performing schedule…
From last Sunday evening through yesterday afternoon, some 2,000 organists have been shuttling around the San Francisco Bay Area for a program of lectures, workshops, and concerts. This installment of the bi-annual convention of the…
If Flaubert was Madame Bovary, then Handel was Partenope. She is the title character of his 1730 opera, a big hit in its time, but then spurned for supposed tawdriness over the ensuing 250 years.…
No work of music has a greater lock on a single ritual than Edward Elgar’s Pomp & Circumstance March no. 1 does on American graduations. Cock an ear in the direction of high school and…
The last time the name Anna Magdalena appeared in fiction it was attached not to a human character but to an assassin’s rifle. The perpetrators of this crime were themselves a pair of highly paid…
Buster Keaton's 1923 silent film The Three Ages — a send-up of D.W. Griffith's epic Intolerance, the grandaddy of all message films — ends on a visionary note. Like its satirical target, The Three Ages…
Johann Sebastian Bach’s last pupil, Johann Gottfried Müthel (1728–88) spent the final two decades of his life as a church organist in the Baltic city of Riga, far to the northeast of the three central…