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Posts published by “David Yearsley”

Hymn From Hell: Greenwood Burns For Trump

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…

Gilded Age Organ Riches From Long A.G.O. and Last Week

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…

Partenope By The Bay: Handel In San Francisco

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.…

Changed Circumstances: Out With Elgar’s Pomp

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…

A Dog’s Age

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…

Tower Of Power

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…

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