Ithaca, New York — I live between a gorge and a cemetery, a position that often gets me to thinking about the fleeting nature of life. The gorge to our south began forming a mere 10,000…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
However uplifting Messiah and the Christmas Oratorio may be, even after all the recordings and annual performances, I’d grab for Heinrich Schütz’s Christmas Story (Historia der Geburt Jesu Christi) even if it meant consigning to the deep the cherished masterpieces of Bach and Handel, both born just thirteen years after Schütz’s death.
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…
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.