In the early 1960s I heard David Oistrakh play the Tchaikovsky concerto. I was a teenager. The concert was performed at the Capitol Theatre, located on Bank Street (on which my father had his shop) near Queen Street, in downtown Ottawa, the capital’s largest movie palace with 2530 seats. Teenagers could purchase the cheap seats, […]
Music and Being
Felix Mendelssohn – Violin Concerto, Op. 64 (1844)
Felix Mendelssohn’s last major orchestral work, the violin concerto, in that exceptional key of E minor, is one of the foremost of the genre, and incorporated several alterations to the violin concerto form, in particular the telescoping of the usual two expositions, one for orchestra, a second for the soloist, through the introduction of the […]
Paul Celan and the Fugal Architecture of the Dead
The subject of Todesfuge—the Death fugue—is the Nazi labour camp. The poet, Paul Celan, was a Romanian Jew and a polyglot whose mother tongue was German. For eighteen months during World War II, he was incarcerated in one of the Romanian labour camps, until liberated by the Red Army in 1944. Todesfuge was written in […]