When he wasn’t busy scoring for the likes of Sergio Leone, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Marco Bellocchio, Bernardo Bertolucci, Elio Petri, Brian De Palma and Terrence Malick, Ennio Morricone could be found hunched over a chessboard. He was a good enough player to hold former world champion Boris Spassky—who famously lost to Bobby Fischer in 1972—to […]

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In April, Xue Wei, a former professor of violin at the Central Conservatory of Music (CCOM) in Beijing, posted on Weibo, a popular Chinese social media channel, to accuse Tong Weidong, the current dean of the orchestral instrument department at the same conservatory, of sexual abuse toward students and corruption in the entrance examination process. […]

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When violinist Lara Michaels auditioned for a place at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), most of the faculty members remained quiet, taking notes on her playing from behind a table. Axel Strauss, a professor of violin and chamber music, was the exception.  “He stood up, he came around the table towards me,” Michaels […]

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It is afternoon in Berlin. Sarah Saviet is not meant to be here. She is meant to be hiking, unreachable in the woods in Spain, but, change of plans, she’s here, playing Bach: in her living room, an afternoon in Berlin. And so we meet.  We talk, and we do not cover everything. She is […]

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I don’t know if anybody has realized, but we’re in the middle of Hurricane Eugène. Since 2020, recordings of all or parts of Ysaÿe’s Six Sonatas (Op. 27) have been released by violinists including Ju-young Baek-Laurent Albrecht Breuninger-Thomas Bowes-Maxim Brilinsky-Anca Vasile Caraman-Elmira Darvarova-James Ehnes-Julia Fischer-David Grimal-Jeroen De Groot-Hilary Hahn-Kejia He-Kerson Leong-Jack Liebeck-Daniel Matejča-Alessandro Perpich-Solveig Steinthorsdottir-Yayoi […]

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In 2005, a Belgian NGO came to Ramallah with a truck full of musical instruments to donate to the city’s nonprofit music school, ​​Al Kamandjati (“The Violinist”). One of the boys who helped to unload the violins, violas, cellos, double-basses, and guitars was 15-year-old Shehada Shalalda, who lived in the neighborhood. It was an innocuous […]

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“Beethoven” It’s always fun when an album nearly slips past your radar until it becomes the catalyst for controversy. This isn’t a slight to Alice Sara Ott, whose early recordings of Chopin’s complete waltzes and Beethoven’s “Waldstein” Sonata are among my favorite interpretations. More likely, her Beethoven compendium—including a live performance of the First Piano […]

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John Holloway plays the Baroque violin with a sinewy sweetness, his lines as textured and alive as the bark of a tree or the hand of a nonagenarian. That his career started on the modern violin in a conventional orchestra—after conservatory, Holloway was briefly principal second in the Bournemouth Sinfonietta—now seems as improbable as late […]

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As the landscape of Twitter continues to become more gnarled and Mad Maxian, are those who remain becoming more revanchistly retrograde? At this point, between the algorithm and the audacity, you’d think no tweet could still be so remarkable as to invoke a pile-on. Especially now that the app is limiting the amount of tweets […]

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There are tenors who fuck, and then there are tenors who fuck. Sure, hearing Jonas Kaufmann pump out “Winterstürme” is good for some heady thrills, and I wouldn’t not tuck Jussi Björling’s “Ch’ella mi creda” in my hope chest. But let’s talk for a moment about the ténor de grâce. At first blush, they may […]

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