Geoffrey O’Brien Verdi’s Decentered Epic The six principal characters of Don Carlos grasp at separate ends, but nothing is finally to be attained. April 21, 2022 issue
Greil Marcus A Ride on the Velvet Underground Revolving around Lou Reed and John Cale, Todd Haynes’s documentary on the avant-garde rock band is itself an art project in the spirit of Andy Warhol’s Factory. November 18, 2021
Simon Callow Portrait of the Artist as a Young Pianist Jeremy Denk’s memoir is not just about piano lessons but about life lessons—how the artist creates a self. April 21, 2022 issue
Adam Kirsch Black Voices, German Song What did German listeners hear when African American singers performed Schubert or Brahms? February 10, 2022 issue
Geoffrey O’Brien Notes from Underground Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s new opera recasts the Orphic myth with Eurydice as the central character. January 13, 2022 issue
Tim Page Playing Together In the late 1980s, when composers and audiences moved in deeply divided circles, Bang on a Can’s commitment to diverse programming began to break down the divisions within contemporary music. November 18, 2021 issue
Larry Wolff A Halo of Nostalgia The frivolous charms of Viennese operetta helped preserve a sense of Habsburg identity after the breakup of the empire. November 4, 2021 issue
Matthew Aucoin The More Fraught the Better Throughout The Rake’s Progress, the steady friction between Stravinsky’s music and Auden’s poetry creates a musico-poetic compound that brims with energy and life. October 21, 2021 issue
George B. Stauffer Alban Berg’s Dissonances Berg’s music, with its lyrical combination of tonal and atonal techniques, is closer to late Romanticism than to the strict modernism of his contemporaries Schoenberg and Webern. June 23, 2022 issue
Adam Shatz Coltrane’s New ‘Love Supreme’ The studio version has long been recognized as the jazz saxophonist’s masterwork. But a recently unearthed live recording is nothing short of a revelation. October 7, 2021
Adam Kirsch Turbulent Music, Turbulent Life Lewis Lockwood’s survey of the history of Beethoven biography shows that our understanding of the music has always been profoundly shaped by the stories we tell about the man. September 23, 2021 issue
James Romm A Journey into Homer’s World The classicist Milman Parry’s quest for the sources of Homeric epic led him in the 1930s to the Yugoslavian bards who sang in coffeehouses and bars much as he imagined Homer did. September 23, 2021 issue
Lorrie Moore The Inspired Bricolage of Bruno Mars The pop artist is sometimes disparaged as a charismatic impersonator of others’ music, but that misses his talent for truly inhabiting what he borrows and making something moving and new. July 2, 2021
Sean Wilentz Bob Dylan, Historian Across the six decades of his career, the singer-songwriter has mined America’s past for images, characters, and events that speak to the nation’s turbulent present. June 19, 2021
Adam Shatz A Blues Surrealist Julius Hemphill’s music uses stark, lyrical abstraction and svelte dissonances to confront the vicissitudes of black American life. May 27, 2021 issue
Matthew Aucoin A Dance to the Music of Death Thomas Adès turns fleetingly recognizable musical elements into unstable, volatile substances tending toward evanescence and escape. May 13, 2021 issue
Namwali Serpell The Ecstatic Internet “Many of us have found a contingent online community of funny, smart black people from across the diaspora, one that isn’t necessarily available to us IRL.” March 27, 2021
Namwali Serpell Black Hole Black pussy is our absent center. It is everywhere and nowhere on the Internet. March 26, 2021
