Raphael Mostel
By Raphael Mostel
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The Schmooze Top-Notch Music Festival Comes to Leo Baeck
When I found out that an ambitious new music festival in New York, the Chelsea Music Festival, was honoring the 150th birthday of Claude Debussy, I was intrigued to learn that the celebration would feature a performance at the Leo Baeck Institute at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan. Debussy — his high-strung, artistic,…
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Culture Philly Opera’s ‘Kumbaya’ Moment
By chance I attended “Slaying the Dragon,” a new opera on the subject of violence and surprising redemption, on June 17, the same day that Rodney King died. King — the victim of a savage beating in 1991 by Los Angeles police (the video of which provoked one of the worst race riots in recent…
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The Schmooze A Concerto and Chance Meeting for the Ages
It’s always surprising how often Jews cross borders. But this coincidence was just too good not to be documented. In January I was raving to my friend Beate Sirota Gordon about a performance of the famously gigantic, wild and strange Ferruccio Busoni Piano Concerto I’d just heard for the first time, performed by Leon Botstein…
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The Schmooze Monday Music: Gil Shaham Revives German Composer
Is there a more sunny and less ego-driven violinist than Israeli-born Gil Shaham? He makes even the most virtuosic music seem so effortless and natural, it’s easy to forget how rare and difficult an achievement that is. This year he has devoted himself to reviving a handful of under-played 20th-century violin concertos. In mid-March, abetted…
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The Schmooze Yiddish Theater on PBS
It is no small feat to recreate the world and emotions of a bygone era. But in his astonishing show celebrating his grandparents, Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, who were superstars of the Yiddish theater, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas has done it. And it is a joy. PBS’s “Great Performances” is broadcasting “The Thomashefskys: Music and…
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The Schmooze Berlin Philharmonic Returns to Roots
In tandem with three New York concerts given by the Berlin Philharmonic in February, New York University’s Deutsches Haus has opened an exhibition of Holocaust survivor David Friedmann’s “Lost Musician Portraits” from the 1920s. These sketches of Berlin Philharmonic members were drawn from life, and captured each of the artists in the act of performing….
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Culture Cultural Bulwarks Against Neo-Nazism
The February 1945 firebombing of Dresden has long been a rallying point for neo-Nazis. Indeed, prominent Holocaust deniers have been assiduous in symbolically conflating Dresden with Hiroshima as the real crematoria of World War II. Neo-Nazis have swarmed this ancient capital of Saxony for every anniversary of the bombing since the reunification of Germany in…
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Culture Last Song of Hitler’s Favorite Crooner
Right up until his death, on December 24 at age 108, Dutch-born singer and actor Johannes Heesters was still performing the songs that had made him famous and, in some circles, infamous. Beloved and much honored in Germany and Austria for a steady stream of stage, screen and television roles and recordings, Heesters owed his…
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