The Bach family’s fascination with, and seminal contributions to, the flute repertoire orbits around the musical centers of Dresden and Berlin. It was in these capital cities of Saxony and Prussia respectively that Germany’s greatest…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
For the second year running, the world’s greatest cinema organist, Dennis James, came to the wilds of Upstate New York to accompany a silent film on Halloween to a riveted audience of horror-loving cineastes packed…
The organ is a wind instrument whose bellows are its lungs. There is something ironic, therefore, in the fact that Duke University, a place that flourished thanks to tobacco money, is one the great organ centers in the world.
Along with the souls of a few forlorn and unlucky violin works of the eighteenth century, Henry Eccles’s G Minor Sonata published in 1720 has spent much of its afterlife in the Purgatory of the…
Last weekend Michael Douglas took home an Emmy for his performance as Liberace in the HBO bio-pic Behind the Candelabra; this accolade might in turn ignite renewed interest in the film that was released in…
When I hear talk of air strikes I think of Dresden, and not just because, like so many American school kids I had to read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. I first visited the city in 1989…
No keyboard player of this or any other age has been more wide-ranging than Keith Jarrett. His contributions to jazz extend from the endlessly astonishing treatment of standards to expansive and spontaneous explorations of the…
The great American pianist Cedar Walton died last week at the age of 79 at his home in Brooklyn after a short illness. Like almost all jazz musicians, Walton made his living largely on the…
The summer road trip seems to offer the chance to catch up on all those recordings accumulated over the previous year. Depending on your perspective, the endless government pork ladled out onto the highways of…