Deeper listening

The music critic and cultural historian Jeremy Eichler, aged forty-nine, has been thinking about music and memory for a very long time. Two decades back, during a brief tenure as a stringer for The New York Times, he described an afternoon spent visiting the violin virtuoso and Vienna native Fritz Kreisler in Woodlawn Cemetery, the bucolic four-hundred-acre necropolis in the Bronx. When he told his musician friends about it, he wrote, they looked at him "quizzically." After all, Kreisler had been dead for nearly forty years. Heading home some 1,500 words later, the young time-traveler was contemplating parallels between notes in a musical score and gravestones as twin "portals of memory."

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Dear Readers,

Starting tomorrow, I'll be sharing personal stories and reflections on Substack, some recent, some going back many years. Rather than twist myself in knots trying to tell you what to expect, let me just encourage you to take look and see if it's for you. The material I'll be starting with was written beginning in January 2021, in the teeth of the pandemic. It was a time that brought out new facets in all of us. I was writing for myself, but the few I've shared the items with seemed to like them, and I hope you will, too. If the link isn't active the first time you try it, give it another day, and all should be in order. My tech skills are not, alas, ready for prime time!

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Concurrently with the New York City Ballet season, Anne Teresa, Baroness De Keersmaeker, gave the North American premiere of her two-hour Goldberg Variations under the aegis of Dance Reflections, presented by Van Cleef & Arpels. The work premiered in the summer of 2020, as the pandemic raged. A London premiere followed in 2022. According to the reviewer for the New York Times who attended the Manhattan premiere, at NYU's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, there's video out there, dating to shortly after Keersmaeker completed the work. In that video, it seems, Keersmaeker has this to say: "I really love to dance. It's really not a joke. It's not vanity. It's really my way of relating to the world."

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Karinska's crucial contribution to the Balanchine corpus is especially so in the chamber-scaled Liebeslieder Walzer. Only four dancing couples appear. The first half is given over to glorified ballroom dances. Then the curtain falls briefly, the women change from floor-length ecru evening dresses and pumps to black-laced romantic mid-length tutus and pointe shoes, and rapturous ballet ensues. The musicians—a standard-issue vocal quartet accompanied by piano four-hands—appear onstage with the dancers, likewise in romantic 19^th-century attire.

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Hello, friends!

Except under exceptional circumstances, book reviewing is a cup I'd prefer to let pass. But in the last couple weeks, I've made the effort gladly on behalf of Jeremy Eichler's Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance, published in August by Knopf (reviewed in The New Criterion, for my debut there), and of Kao Kalia Yang's Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life, just out from Simon & Schuster (reviewed in Air Mail). Both titles have received kudos aplenty. In all humility, I hope you'll find my two cents uniquely insightful. Apologies in advance if you run afoul of a paywall, but you know how it is.

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