News
The mandate of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC, which has just concluded the celebration of its fiftieth anniversary, is far broader than that of being one of America’s premiere performing arts centers. Rather, as the nation’s cultural center, its goal is
Know Your Composer
Haunting or bewitching are words that come to mind to the hundreds of thousands of those who have experienced Samuel Barber’s 1936 Adagio for Strings. Or the countless millions whose lives have been unwittingly changed by eight minutes of music of which they could not name composer or title.
Know Your Composer
One day in 1979, the chief music critic at the San Francisco Examiner, Michael Walsh, who had the desk next to mine, sidled over and handed me the album of a new musical, Sweeney Todd. ‘It’s actually an opera’, he whispered conspiratorially, ‘but don’t tell anyone’. When I
