Listening now to Enrico Caruso’s last recording made in September of 1920, you would never suspect that you are hearing the voice of a heavy smoker. Caruso favored strong Egyptian cigarettes, even enjoying them between…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
Praised by some as the summation of Robert Redford’s distinguished acting career, his latest film begins without music, just the stillness of a calm sea at dawn, the wide-screen expanse bathed in myriad shades of…
What did people do before the invention of motion pictures to visualize the devastations wrought by natural disasters? From God’s fury on earth manifested in hurricanes and fires to the final cataclysm of the Last…
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…
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…