Copyright 2025 Matthew Gurewitsch Sat, 06 Dec 2025 23:32:13 -0500 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Matthew Gurewitsch :: Writings https://beyondcriticism.com matthew@beyondcriticism.com (Matthew Gurewitsch) webmaster@pundicity.com en-us https://beyondcriticism.com/31138/maurice-sendak-macbeth Sat, 6 Dec 2025 09:00:00 EST Have you seen High Wire: Calder's Circus at 100 at the Whitney? If so, you'll know how hard it is to tear yourself away. Surprise! I was running late when I raced out the revolving door two weeks ago to catch the matinee of Arabella at the Met. Meant to... https://beyondcriticism.com/28728/from-the-archive-meistersinger Sat, 19 Jul 2025 09:00:00 EST Olaf Bär--Bär, pronounced bear, means bear--has come to the court of the art song like a folk tale's hero from afar. (Even the whiff of the Nordic forests in his name seems right.) Unknown, untried, scarcely regarded even by those who sent him from East... https://beyondcriticism.com/28657/i-knew-a-man-who-knew-brahms Sat, 28 Jun 2025 09:00:00 EST If you knew Stoki like Nancy knew Stoki! Still in her teens, Nancy Shear of Philadelphia began insinuating herself into the world of the Philadelphia Orchestra as single-mindedly as Eve Harrington, of "All About Eve" fame, insinuated herself into the... https://beyondcriticism.com/28626/round-and-round-with-balanchine Mon, 9 Jun 2025 09:00:00 EST According to a hoary mantra, dance is the ephemeral art—not one of any number of ephemeral arts of performance, but the Platonic quintessence of the fleeting. The choreographer George Balanchine seems not to have expected his ballets to survive him for... https://beyondcriticism.com/28606/but-mad-north-by-northwest Mon, 26 May 2025 09:00:00 EST VIENNA — The operatic cabinet of curiosities that is Vienna's Theater an der Wien came up with a potential beaut this season: the first Hamlet opera, originally performed in Venice in 1705, revived in Naples in 1711, and then in London (imagine!) in... https://beyondcriticism.com/28604/eclectic-nycb-lives-up-to-its-title Mon, 26 May 2025 09:00:00 EST For flashes of Zen insight, George Balanchine's collected sayings rival or surpass Yogi Berra's. Did the founding choreographer of the New York City Ballet truly once propose that all ballets should be called Swan Lake because then they would all sell... https://beyondcriticism.com/28599/in-amsterdam-katie-mitchell-sci-fi-makeover-for Tue, 20 May 2025 09:00:00 EST AMSTERDAM — On April 23, the Dutch National Opera premiered a new production of Die Frau ohne Schatten, a work that always stretches a company to its limits. Originally planned for April 2020, the show was to have crowned Marc Albrecht's decade-long... https://beyondcriticism.com/28416/riccardo-muti-and-the-vienna-philharmonic Sat, 8 Mar 2025 09:00:00 EST NEW YORK — Who denies the nimbus of the Golden Hall of the Musikverein, home of the Vienna Philharmonic? Yet it's a truism among camp followers who hear the orchestra everywhere that the players never sound as good as they do at Carnegie Hall—something... https://beyondcriticism.com/28044/time-echo Wed, 4 Sep 2024 09:00:00 EST Deeper listening The music critic and cultural historian Jeremy Eichler, aged forty-nine, has been thinking about music and memory for a very long time. Two decades back, during a brief tenure as a stringer for The New York Times, he described an... https://beyondcriticism.com/28035/announcing-my-new-substack Tue, 3 Sep 2024 09:00:00 EST Dear Readers, Starting tomorrow, I'll be sharing personal stories and reflections on Substack, some recent, some going back many years. Rather than twist myself in knots trying to tell you what to expect, let me just encourage you to take look and see if... https://beyondcriticism.com/27664/keersmaeker-bach-tharp-brel-and-balanchine Sat, 6 Apr 2024 09:00:00 EST Concurrently with the New York City Ballet season, Anne Teresa, Baroness De Keersmaeker, gave the North American premiere of her two-hour Goldberg Variations under the aegis of Dance Reflections, presented by Van Cleef & Arpels. The work premiered in the... https://beyondcriticism.com/27663/brahms-balanchine-and-love-in-three-quarter-time Tue, 2 Apr 2024 09:00:00 EST Karinska's crucial contribution to the Balanchine corpus is especially so in the chamber-scaled Liebeslieder Walzer. Only four dancing couples appear. The first half is given over to glorified ballroom dances. Then the curtain falls briefly, the women... https://beyondcriticism.com/27667/busy-busy Sat, 30 Mar 2024 09:00:00 EST Hello, friends! Except under exceptional circumstances, book reviewing is a cup I'd prefer to let pass. But in the last couple weeks, I've made the effort gladly on behalf of Jeremy Eichler's Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the... https://beyondcriticism.com/27662/balanchine-four-temperaments-symphony-in-three Fri, 29 Mar 2024 09:00:00 EST As its sole all-Balanchine program for the winter season, the New York City Ballet offered a diptych of The Four Temperaments (1946) and Liebeslieder Waltzer (1960), which is a diptych in its own right (we'll get to that). Symphony in Three Movements... https://beyondcriticism.com/27619/jerome-robbins-in-winter Sun, 17 Mar 2024 09:00:00 EST Keeping up with the dance scene in New York is hard enough when you live there. When your visits are sporadic, as mine have been since decamping from Manhattan to Maui thirteen years ago, it's impossible. In February, though, I hung around long enough...