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…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
Aside from its winning title, the best material offered up by the documentary film Twenty Feet from Stardom are the musical performances, seen and — more important — heard both in footage of concerts extending…
How did I get into this? That’s the inevitable question of concert day, one that has been gnawing at the performer’s nerves through the preceding night, perhaps for days before. You’ve practiced for weeks on…
Whether on silver screen or in symphony hall, it can be a curse to be type cast. So consummately did Bach play the part of a composer of learned fugues that his lighter side is…
As has become even clearer this Fourth of July with the ongoing saga of fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden playing out on the world stage, what was celebrated on Independence Day in America is not independence…
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…
Like an obnoxiously drunk, loudmouthed, long-winded, overly-pleased-with-himself, vacuously ostentatious guest who refuses to leave the party even though it’s long been over, Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby lingers at the local multiplex, Scotch in one…
The rolling storm that is Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring thundered through its hundredth anniversary last Wednesday, the 29th of May. I spent most of the day at 39,000 feet, high above global festivities that included…
Bach was buried on July 31, 1750, three days after his death, on the south side of St. John’s church outside the walls of the city of Leipzig. So-called “extramural” (outside-the-walls) burial became the norm after the introduction of the Lutheran Reformation in Leipzig in the 1530s.