The Latest on New York Arts

• John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby in Boston
  “So we beat on, boats against the currents, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Nick Carraway’s concluding insight in The Great Gatsby is one of the great closing sentences in literature, and one of the great images of our human helplessness to escape the past. It’s also the line that ends John Harbison’s Gatsby opera, which—13 years after its premiere at […]
• Vladimir Jurowski Conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra in Prokofiev and Shostakovich
  Crossing the color line. In the twentieth century Russian music became a standoff between revolution and counter-revolution, the irony being that the White Russian composers who fled the Bolsheviks were the true revolutionaries while the Reds who stayed to endure Soviet rule were forced to toe the line of backward-looking conservatism. But the music isn […]
• Yeats’s Ireland – New York Arts and Anthroposophy NYC present a musical reading by Lloyd Schwartz, with James Cleveland, Fiddle, and Dorien Staljanssens, Flute – Saturday, June 1, 7pm
  On Saturday, June 1, 2013, at 7pm, in connection with Michael Miller’s exhibition of photographs, Ireland, and Joanna Gabler’s exhibition of her “transcapes,” Nature and her Essence, the acclaimed poet, Lloyd Schwartz, Senior Classical Music Editor of New York Arts, will read poems by W. B. Yeats and other Irish poets. The reading will be […]
• Shostakovich’s Rediscovered Opera ‘Orango’ and the Fourth Symphony in London
  By the skin of his teeth. As a bizarre offshoot of the workers' paradise, Soviet ideology boasted of creating a New Man, with possible help from the apes — before DNA was discovered, crackpot experiments that involved interbreeding humans with lower primates were conceived. The only success was fictitious, a creature named Orango who began life as a Fre […]
• BSO Appoints Andris Nelsons as its New Music Director
  Given some of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s distinguished elder statesmen music directors—Karl Muck, Pierre Monteux, Serge Koussevitzky, Charles Munch, Erich Leinsdorf, James Levine—it’s probably surprising that they have appointed 34-year-old Latvian conductor Andris Nelsons to succeed James Levine as the BSO’s 15th music director since 1881. Still, it’s […]