Raphael Mostel
By Raphael Mostel
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Culture Death at the Doorbell
The world, as we know it, ended in May. At least that was the proposition of the New York Philharmonic. Building toward the end of his first year as the orchestra’s new music director, Alan Gilbert envisioned a spectacular presentation: a fully staged New York premiere of “Le Grand Macabre” (French slang for “the Grim…
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Culture The Mortara Case
If, as Christians believe, there is a hell, then surely Pope Pius IX earned a place in it for the kidnapping of the 6-year-old Jewish child of the Mortara family in 1858. New York’s enterprising Dicapo Opera Theatre commissioned, and has just given the world premiere of, a new opera based on this sensational true…
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Culture Bildung Mendelssohn
How ugly were these porcelain monkeys? Ugly enough that when the West Berlin Senate tried to put one of them in a 1978 museum exhibition about Prussia, a different one was substituted because the original was judged too embarrassing. Composer Felix Mendelssohn had kept the original in his study, to show visitors. To understand why…
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Culture Mixing Opera and Zionism Hessler Installed Where Neo-Nazis Roam
‘When Saxony’s minister of arts presented me to the press in Dresden and the first question was, ‘How do you feel as a woman?’ I was so tempted to say, ‘After 50 years, I’m used to being a woman!’” Ulrike Hessler said, laughing as she recounted the public announcement that she had been chosen intendant…
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Culture Bernstein, Davening in the Vernacular
As difficult as it is for outsiders to understand, especially in retrospect, Leonard Bernstein’s overachieving father, Sam, was so opposed to his son’s fixation with music that neither he nor his wife, Jenny, even showed up for their son’s student debut as soloist in Grieg’s Piano Concerto with the orchestra of Boston Latin School. For…
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Culture Felix Mendelssohn: Music That ‘Keeps Working’
Felix Mendelssohn was still alive when the New York Philharmonic was founded in 1842. “He most certainly influenced our orchestra from its inception,” Philharmonic archivist Barbara Haws told the Forward. “Our very first program featured Mendelssohn. In fact, before his death in 1848, a total of six Mendelssohn works were performed in our first 14…
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Culture Apples and Fresh Lemon
“For centuries it survived. It survived without composers, even without printed parts or institutions. It survived because it was important and was transmitted from one generation to another,” Jordi Savall said after he and his ensemble had just proved the point by playing an ancient Sephardic lullaby in a series of guises: Moroccan, Greek, Turkish…
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Culture Treasuring Felix, Embodying Moses’ Enlightenment in Music
Why do we still feel the need to defend Felix Mendelssohn even in this, the bicentennial year of his birth? In his all too brief lifetime, he was deeply appreciated as the musician most admired by other musicians: as a person, as a colleague, as a performer, but especially as a composer. Mendelssohn was perhaps…
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