Culture Vulture
I’ve been going to BSO Open Rehearsal for some 50 years at Tanglewood and can’t remember ever having as alienating an experience as I and over one thousand other attendees had Wednesday night at Symphony Hall.
Read MoreAlthough its interior says 21st century, the Shalin Liu Performance Center has a homespun, American 19th-century facade that made me think of Mark Twain and the provincial opera houses of the California Gold Rush. Care was taken to reference the original Haskins Building that once housed a clothing store called Madras and the local yacht…
Read MoreIt would have been easy to make an entire season out of the ideas the Boston Chamber Music Society compressed into one afternoon; as it is, the wealth of material had the audience buzzing during the two intermissions. Some found the multi-media presentation too much of a good thing. I found it exhilarating and challenging…
Read MoreMy Nine Lives reads like a conversation with a man who has worked through more than his share of ups and downs in the world of classical music. The tone is understated and graceful; his narrative could easily have faltered in less skillful hands. Pianist Leon Fleisher aims for a general readership. It’s a very…
Read MoreIt’s very difficult to lure new audiences into the concert hall in most parts of the United States, hard to find useful introductions to pieces of classical music and hard to judge from the reaction of UnderScore concertgoers whether they were pleased with their experience. I applaud the BSO’s initiative. UnderScore Friday. Presented by the…
Read MoreAuthor and Arts Fuse Contributor Helen Epstein explains why she decided to take her 1994 biography Joe Papp: An American Life and convert it into an eBook—given what may be the precarious future for the traditional book, she “wanted to save it for posterity.” By Helen Epstein. AF: Joe Papp died in 1991. Why publish…
Read MoreSince its debut, the play Hysteria has been advertised as “in the comic tradition of Tom Stoppard,” blithely blending fact and fantasy, real life people and fictional characters into frothy fun. Unfortunately, Johnson is no Stoppard. Hysteria or Fragments of an Analysis of an Obsessional Neurosis by Terry Johnson. Directed by Daniel Gidron. Presented by…
Read MoreYou can understand why historian and novelist Richard Francis became attached to this quixotic piece of New England history. It’s got an amazing cast of colorful characters, and dramatic rivalries that involve contests over land, love, money, and sex. Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and Their Search for Utopia by Richard Francis. Yale University Press, 344…
Read MoreTranslating what became Under a Cruel Star was a labor of love as well as a work of feminism. There were few memoirs around of a life that spanned Nazism and Stalinism. None was written by a woman. By Helen Epstein. Readers of today’s New York Times found a remarkable story on the obituary page:…
Read MoreTribes makes us privy to the dynamics of a twenty-first-century, secular, Jewish family in a series of fast-paced scenes that leave few holds barred. The parents—middle-class, middle-aged, hyper-verbal intellectuals—are trying to cope with the fact that their three adult children have returned to inhabit the nest. By Helen Epstein. When I first wrote London friends…
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