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Classical Music Commentary: “Boulez est mort”

January 8, 2016
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And yet, for all the violence of his youthful polemics and his unflinchingly-held beliefs, Pierre Boulez was neither demagogue nor ideologue.

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Poetry Review: Two Chapbooks from Anton Yakovlev — Urban Alienation, Perfectly Pitched

January 7, 2016
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Yakovlev’s poems speak to the reader quietly, with assumed familiarity.

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Film Review: “Mustang” — Passion, Caged

January 6, 2016
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Despite being entrapped in a controlling social order, the sisters behave as most adolescents do: sometimes impulsively.

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Fuse Feature: The Zeitgeist in Film — 2015

January 5, 2016
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Here’s one more wrap-up of the year in film.

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Fuse Feature: Best Live Music Shows of 2015 — As Well as Some Disappointments

January 5, 2016
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The magazine’s Roots and World Music critic looks back at a year of live performances: here are the winners and a few losers.

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Film Review: Hell is the Nervous Laughter of Tom Noonan — Charlie Kaufman’s Inscrutable “Anomalisa”

January 4, 2016
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Charlie Kaufman crafts worlds where people find love in unlikely places, and lose love so easily you’d think they actually want to be miserable.

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Classical Album Reviews: Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 3 and Mass in C (SFS Media), Music for Harp (Innova)

January 3, 2016
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Beethoven’s Mass in C is the highlight. Would that the San Francisco Symphony’s performance of the Third Concerto had more electricity.

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Fuse Remembrance: Kurt Masur (1927-2015)

January 3, 2016
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Kurt Masur leaves behind a complex legacy, one that’s not neatly (or easily) summed up by the caricature of a stern, conservative, Old World German maestro.

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Book Review: “Vilna My Vilna” — A Moving Memorial to the Lodestar of Yiddish Culture

January 2, 2016
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Abraham Karpinowitz offers a salutation of the heart to his beloved city of Vilna.

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Fuse Film Preview: Graham Greene’s “Words in Motion” at the MFA

January 1, 2016
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In his best screenplays, Graham Greene explored the idea of the protagonist as anti-hero well before it became a popular trope in the 1950s and ’60s.

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