Category Archives: Poetry

BOB DYLAN CONCERT: A “GHOSTLY APPEARANCE”

Since  it opened its doors in 1889 Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre has heard the world’s  great voices, in words, in music, and in both. On Wednesday, the eighty year old  Nobel Prize-winning Bob Dylan offered an inspired  concert which placed him in that pantheon of voices. Dylan opened the concert with 1971’s “Watching the River Flow”, […]

MODEST MUSSORGSKY HAS HIS DAY: BORIS GODUNOV DONE HIS WAY

Exactly one hundred and fifty years since Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov was rejected for performance by Russia’s Mariinsky Theatre his version of his opera is staged and transmitted live to hundreds of thousands of spectators around the world. Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881) came from a more or less peasant family in Russia. That fact, plus his […]

NEW WEBSITE: THE S YMBOLIC WORLD- Chesterton for the 21st Century

                  G.K. Chesterton called them  fairy tales. They inspired C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. SOME solemn and superficial people (for nearly all very superficial people are solemn) have declared that the fairy-tales are immoral; they base this upon some accidental circumstances or regrettable incidents in the war […]

THE MET’S AKHNATEN: A HYMN TO THE TRUE LIGHT

When Philip Glass’ Akhnaten first appeared in 1984, the New York Daily News was moved to label Mr. Glass “the Ronald Reagan of composers. This time around,  no one is thinking of Ronald Reagan after experiencing the Glass/Kamensek/McDermott/Pollard/Pay  production at the Metropolitan Opera. Instead, the words ”breathtaking”, “hypnotic”, “gorgeous”, “luscious”, “overwhelming”, and “beautiful,” are most […]

VA SYMPHONY HAS THEM DANCING IN THE STREETS

   On an October evening, fifty-two years, ago a seventeen year old boy wandered into UVa’s Memorial Gymnasium in Charlottesville to hear his first pop concert,  performed by a group called Matha and The Vandellas. Ever since that night, Motown has been my pop music of choice, with some space reserved  for the eternal Bob […]