Category: AJBlogs

One of my Twitter followers asked over the weekend if I’d post a list of my favorite film scores. This is, needless to say, an impossible task, but I did spend a few minutes drawing up the following roster. – Terry Teachout

The most notable thing about Barrie Kosky’s production of Handel’s Agrippina at the Royal Opera is that every member of this ensemble can act — especially Joyce DiDonato, giving what I expect will be remembered as an historic performance of the title role. – Paul Levy

Heidi Hall, an old friend of mine from Smalltown, U.S.A., died last week. She was 49, far too young for so extravagantly vital a woman to lose her life to cancer. I, on the other hand, am 63, which isn’t nearly as old as it was a few generations ago. Why did people back then seem to age so much more quickly than they do now? – Terry Teachout

This show turned out to be more timely than the NYBG could have known when it began to organize what it billed as its “largest botanical exhibition ever.” – Lee Rosenbaum

It’s been a busy month at Tula’s, a jazz fixture in the US Pacific Northwest for more than two decades, as most of the top jazz musicians in Seattle are playing their last gigs at the club and it’s been a full house every night. – Doug Ramsey

Ever on the frontier of experimentation, the adventurous tenor saxophonist Noah Preminger is aided by the complexity of Steve Lampert’s composition Zigsaw. – Doug Ramsey

Bertoldo di Giovanni, a favorite of Lorenzo de’ Medici and now the subject of a compact but comprehensive Frick Collection survey, is a Florentine sculptor who has been overshadowed by his more illustrious teacher (Donatello) and revered pupil (Michelangelo). – Lee Rosenbaum

Kerry Politzer, Diagonal: A Tribute To Durval Ferreira
The pianist recruits several of her talented Pacific Northwest colleagues for this album of pieces by a Brazilian composer whose works were central to the rise of bossa nova. – Doug Ramsey

And why it’s a problem: “What we’re looking at right now, this extreme marginalization of classical music, is really the chickens coming home to roost.” – Joe Horowitz

Comparing a 1967 collage to a Photoshopped image in the current New York Times: Are both art? – Jan Herman