This story, initially published in October, 2018, has been republished in honor of Mozart’s 265th birthday on Jan. 27, 2021. The librettist Lorenzo da Ponte — an exiled Jewish-born Venetian who turned to the arts after proving too irreverent for the Church — had a lot in common with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The two shared…
“When I first went to Camp Cejwin at 12, I knew nothing about Judaism. By the end of the summer, I was able to lead services in Hebrew and decided to go to Hebrew School before my Bar Mitzvah” renowned Judaica artist Mark Podwal, whose current project is a series of posters for each new…
An Israeli study has demonstrated that listening to the music of Mozart is more conducive to the development of premature babies than is exposure to Bach. Many studies have demonstrated the benefits of classical music to the development of babies. But the Ichilov Hospital research, led by Prof. Dror Mandel director of the Neonatal Intensive…
Competitions are for horses, not for artists was the verdict of the great Hungarian composer and pianist Bela Bartok. And there is a part of Israeli pianist Boris Giltburg, declared winner on June 1 of one of the world’s most prestigious and gruelling music contests, that agrees. He won Belgium’s Queen Elisabeth Competition in spite…
Today Richard Tauber, the Austrian tenor of Jewish ancestry, is a genuine icon, as the title of a splendid 5-CD box set of his recordings from EMI Classics indicates. Yet his life is a cautionary tale of how critics should reflect on the possible impact of their words. By the 1920s, Tauber had achieved matinee…
After listening to and viewing a rehearsal for the New York Philharmonic Orchestra’s presentation of “In Seven Days,” the 2008 concerto for piano and moving image by Thomas Adès and Tal Rosner being performed January 7 and 8 at Avery Fisher Hall, I was ready to become a creationist. Not that the piece works to…
In a memoir of his late parents Mr. and Mrs. William F. Buckley, “Losing Mum and Pup,” newly out in paperback from Twelve Publishers, Christopher Buckley quotes from the funeral oration given by Henry Kissinger at his father’s 2008 service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. In it, Kissinger states that the elder Buckley “wrote as Mozart…
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