Using music as medicine goes back to Antiquity and beyond. The Greeks were not alone in recognizing that music was powerful stuff, capable of not only calming the body, but also of rousing it. Administered…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, which will doubt-less figure prominently in the Academy Awards nominations to be issued next week, is a horror flick en pointe: terrifyingly claustrophobic, often painful, massively melodramatic, and ultimately self-destructive. In…
With their re-make of True Grit the Coens have shot and stuffed the original animal: so often, in the sights of big game hunters, the Western species refuses to go extinct.
Christmas is the most musical season. Melodies embedded in the memory are reanimated to light the fires of commerce, Christian devotion, and the family romance, packaging the Christmas Experience in song. It is impossible to…
For all its much-hyped and massively expensive high-tech stage machinery, the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Wagner’s Das Rheingold seems surprisingly underpowered, as if so much money and mental power went into the behemoth contraption…
There are few things worth giving up a perfect fall afternoon in Upstate New York for, but Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman with live music is one of them. A dinner break and a return for…
Being present at a musical performance of unexpected greatness is even more memorable than having high expectations met. When I heard Rostropovich with the Boston Symphony under Seiji Ozawa in 1985 playing the Dvorak Cello…