The country singer Lee Greenwood was born three weeks before Joe Biden. A self-styled evangelical Christian Republican, Greenwood is a wiry octogenarian, well-spoken and exuding a fiery intelligence. At 81, he pursues a performing schedule…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
From last Sunday evening through yesterday afternoon, some 2,000 organists have been shuttling around the San Francisco Bay Area for a program of lectures, workshops, and concerts. This installment of the bi-annual convention of the…
If Flaubert was Madame Bovary, then Handel was Partenope. She is the title character of his 1730 opera, a big hit in its time, but then spurned for supposed tawdriness over the ensuing 250 years.…
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…
The last time the name Anna Magdalena appeared in fiction it was attached not to a human character but to an assassin’s rifle. The perpetrators of this crime were themselves a pair of highly paid…
Buster Keaton's 1923 silent film The Three Ages — a send-up of D.W. Griffith's epic Intolerance, the grandaddy of all message films — ends on a visionary note. Like its satirical target, The Three Ages…
Johann Sebastian Bach’s last pupil, Johann Gottfried Müthel (1728–88) spent the final two decades of his life as a church organist in the Baltic city of Riga, far to the northeast of the three central…
It is not until the last of the eight episodes of Ripley, which dropped in April on Netflix, that Bach’s music makes an appearance. I’d been expecting it, and not just any piece from among…
The Eurovision Song Contest cannot be neutral. There is just one winner. That winner is chosen by combining the popular cellphone votes of millions of viewers with the tallies of the five-member juries in each…