Raphael Mostel
By Raphael Mostel
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Culture Celebrating a Composer Who Celebrates Multiple Cultures
Composer Osvaldo Golijov is being celebrated at New York City’s Lincoln Center with a month-long series of performances of his works, titled The Passion of Osvaldo Golijov. Musical America named Golijov composer of the year. His latest release, “Ayre” — based on traditional songs and poems in Ladino, Arabic and Hebrew — evokes the period…
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Culture Celebrating a Composer Who Celebrates Multiple Cultures
Composer Osvaldo Golijov is being celebrated at New York City’s Lincoln Center with a month-long series of performances of his works, titled The Passion of Osvaldo Golijov. Musical America named Golijov composer of the year. His latest release, “Ayre” — based on traditional songs and poems in Ladino, Arabic and Hebrew — evokes the period…
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Culture A Demanding Composer Meets His Orchestral Match
In between rehearsals at the Metropolitan Opera, composer Tobias Picker laughingly recalled another opera orchestra — which shall remain nameless — whose violinists, protesting his penchant for writing in the instruments’ extreme range, greeted him in rehearsal in mock submission, waving white handkerchiefs on the end of their bows. Nothing of the sort awaits him…
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Culture A Critic Hears False Notes in Music History
One of the liveliest and most remarkable books about music was published this year. In “The Oxford History of Western Music,” iconoclastic University of California, Berkeley, professor Richard Taruskin offers a 4,000-page, six-volume survey of everything there is to know about Western classical music. For one person to encompass the vast range of subject matter…
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News Pushing Foundations To Give Everything They Have
Lewis B. Cullman made a fortune as a businessman, but he has spent much of his life giving it away. He traces his passion for philanthropy to his mother, who inspired him to donate his fortune to worthy causes. “Why not get some pleasure out of it,” she said to him many years ago, “instead…
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Israel News Rethinking Wagner in the Operatic Heart of ‘Germania’
In presenting the Cultural Prize, Munich’s highest honor, to Sir Peter Jonas in January, the city’s mayor praised the general director of the 351-year-old Bavarian State Opera for “treating the arts not as an incidental but as a central concern of an enlightened modern society… not only to preserve tradition, but also to locate it…
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Culture Simple and Delightful: They Don’t All Do That
What is the nature of true love? If there is such a thing, how to understand infidelity? One of the most famously cynical and humane answers is “Cosi Fan Tutte” (“They All Do That”), and it is the last of three operas that Mozart wrote in collaboration with librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. In this comedy…
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News Carmen Comes Home
An astonishing 100 operas are set in Seville — and not just any operas, mind you, but some of the greatest: Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and “Marriage of Figaro,” Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino,” and Rossini’s “Barber of Seville.” But the one chosen to kick off the first Seville International Music Festival in September…
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