You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Orchestra’ tag.
Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance. Jeremy Eichler. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf. 2023.
Reviewed by Karen Painter
Jeremy Eichler makes a passionate case that as we approach a world without living memory of the Holocaust, there is an “ethical imperative” to attend to “musical memorials” which summon “our commitment to witness” (pp. 174–175). Written when Eichler was classical music critic for the Boston Globe, Time’s Echo bears the fruits of his profession everywhere in eloquent and astute description of music that matters deeply to him. A historian who wrote his dissertation on Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, Eichler undertakes the ambitious task of showing how music became so important to German Jews, which finds him starting his story in the Enlightenment, tracing the ideal of Bildung (cultivation) across Central European history. The book’s subtitle notwithstanding, we arrive at World War II only in chapter four out of ten.
Read the rest of this entry »The Pope’s Maestro. Gilbert Levine. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010. 456 pp. + DVD. ISBN 978-0-4704-9065-5
Reviewed by John T. Pawlikowski
At the beatification of the late Pope John Paul II on May 1, 2011, a Brooklyn-born Jewish orchestra conductor had an honored seat in the audience. How this came to be for a traditional Jew with little prior contact with Catholic religious leaders is the basic narrative of this volume told from a first person perspective by Levine.
Levine’s grandparents emigrated to the United States from Poland. His mother-in-law is a survivor of Auschwitz. He has been a distinguished conductor who has performed with leading orchestras in North America, Europe, and Israel. In 1987 Levine was invited to serve as a guest conductor of the Krakow Philharmonic for one week. This is where his story begins. Read the rest of this entry »
Musica Judaica Online Reviews 