What Happened To 'Baby Jane?' She's Turning 50
Baby Jane Hudson is now 50 years old — or at least the strange and brilliant movie in which she's the main character is, just released as a beautifully remastered Blu-ray. Robert Aldrich's grotesque...
View ArticleCecilia Bartoli's New 'Mission' Unearths Baroque Gems
I never heard of the Baroque composer Agostino Steffani until last year, when the Boston Early Music Festival presented the North American premiere of Steffani's Niobe, an opera about the mythical...
View ArticleMozart's Starring Role In 'Sunday Bloody Sunday'
Sunday Bloody Sunday is one of those films that lets you into the lives of believable, complicated characters. A handsome, self-centered young artist played by the actor/rock singer Murray Head is...
View ArticleCinerama Brought The Power Of Peripheral Vision To The Movies
As early as silent film, directors attempted to create widescreen images. But in the 1950s it became a commercial necessity to give the multitude of new TV watchers what they couldn't get on a small...
View ArticleThe Art Of Life: Claes Oldenburg At MOMA
The sculptor Claes Oldenburg was born in Stockholm but grew up in Chicago, went to Yale and came to New York in 1956, where he became a key player in the pop art movement — the major counter-reaction...
View ArticleBranagh Imagines Mozart's 'Magic Flute' In Wartime
Mozart's The Magic Flute, the last opera he lived to complete, has some of his most sublime and sublimely comic music. Technically, it's more of a musical comedy, what in German is called a Singspiel,...
View ArticleA Forgotten Quartet, Reissued And Reevaluated
A movie last year called A Late Quartettold the traumatic story of what happens when a famous string quartet has to change personnel. But, in fact, most string quartets — like symphony orchestras, only...
View ArticleAfter Ailing, A Favorite Conductor Stages His Comeback
An extended ovation greeted conductor James Levine last May when he returned to performing after a two-year absence. In 2011, he resigned as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and...
View Article'Pearl Earring' Is The Crown Jewel Of The Frick's Dutch Exhibit
Some years ago, I wrote a poem called "Why I Love Vermeer," which ends "I've never lived in a city without a Vermeer." I could say that until 1990, when Vermeer's exquisite painting The Concert was one...
View ArticleReview: Jonas Kaufmann Sings Wagner And Verdi
Transcript TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. At 44, the German tenor Jonas Kaufmann may be the most popular tenor of his generation and one of the most versatile. Music critic Lloyd Schwartz...
View ArticleA Poetry Reading: 'To My Oldest Friend, Whose Silence Is Like A Death'
Fresh Air's classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz is also a poet. He recently published a poem about friendship and loss on Poets.org. It's titled "To My Oldest Friend, Whose Silence Is Like A...
View Article'Degenerate' Exhibit Recalls Nazi War On Modern Art
One of the most unsettling rooms in an important art exhibit at New York's Neue Galerie is a room in which numerous empty frames are hanging, with guesses about which paintings might have been in them....
View Article1936 'Show Boat': A Multiracial, Musical Melodrama, Now Out On DVD
Broadway had never seen anything like it when Show Boat arrived at the Ziegfeld Theatre in 1927. The score was unforgettable and the story tackled complex racial issues. There have been three movie...
View ArticleEvery Composer Needs A Great Storyteller
The legendary German conductor Otto Klemperer was one of the most profound musicians of the 20th Century. In the 1960s, nearing the end of his career, he overcame many physical handicaps to create an...
View ArticleWith Both Farce And Feeling, Currentzis''Figaro' Succeeds Magnificently
There are many recordings of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro. Do we need another? In the case of this new recording led by the young Greek conductor Teodor Currentzis, Fresh Air classical music critic...
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