Below is Stephen Follows’ entry for Solti in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Solti, Sir Georg (1912–1997), conductor, was born György Stern in Vérmezö utca, in the Buda district of Budapest, on 21 October 1912, the younger of the two children of Moricz (later Móric) Stern, a businessman originally from Balatonfökajár in southern Hungary,…
On a recent visit to Chicago I didn’t get the sense that Chicago memorializes their native (or adoptive) musical sons very diligently. This article confirms this impression: worth following the links in this article. This recently released collection by Rhino commemorates Curtis Mayfield’s 50 years as a solo artist and this year marks 20 years since Mayfield’s…
1957. Oil on canvas, 270 x 200 cm. Koninklij Museum voor Schone Kunsten A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art (3 ed.), John Glaves-Smith and Ian Chilvers Here is a late piece by the one and only Bernard Williams from The New York Review of Books. (It’s easy to imagine the crass approach the regressive…
Perhaps this rates (see video below) as the greatest musical performance that I’ve ever witnessed — crikey, has it really been almost 30 years? (12th Sep, 1986). That year I think I attended some 30 concerts as a promenader but still never made it into the hard core club (not even close). Read the very excellent Peter…
Ed Feser has another terrific earlier posting on Steely Dan (I recently brought attention to this one). Ed engages with Roger Scruton’s analysis of “popular” music. In older musical traditions, the focus was on the music itself, which had only a contingent relationship to the performer even when the performer was the one who composed it .…
manwithoutqualities 