About
I decided to start a blog for three reasons:
1) People felt that there should be a part of the Threepenny website that was available only online, not in the printed magazine.
2) Some of the things I wanted to write about seemed as if they would benefit from a slightly more timely response than our usual quarterly publication permitted.
3) I was seeing and hearing so much interesting art — especially in the areas of dance and music, though also in literature, theater, and the visual arts — that I couldn't fit everything I wanted to say into The Threepenny Review without taking over the whole publication. And if you are not Diderot or Karl Kraus (and I am certainly neither), it is never a good idea to write the whole magazine yourself. But I figured the rules of blogs would allow me to monopolize one of those.
I struggled to come up with a good title for the blog and at first resisted using my own name, feeling (as those named Lesser are bound to feel) that diminishment is not necessarily a selling point. But then I figured that if people named Grudge or Drudge can use their names on websites, I should certainly not be abashed at calling this The Lesser Blog. So here it is, and I hope you enjoy it.
Wendy Lesser
Editor, The Threepenny Review-
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Tag Archives: simon rattle
Britannia in Berlin
A couple of weeks ago I attended two terrific concerts as part of Berlin’s Musikfest, and both, by chance, had British links. This was not why I picked them—I chose them for their intriguing programs and their great conductors—but this … Continue reading
Back in Berlin!
I’ve been here a little over a week now, and for the first time in seven or eight months, I am getting to hear live music again. It is so thrilling that I can barely analyze or even fully take … Continue reading
Rattle’s Berlin Philharmonic
A great deal of what I know about music, it turns out, has accrued to me over the years through my attendance at Simon Rattle’s performances with the Berlin Philharmonic. When I first arrived in Berlin in 2003, Rattle had only recently taken … Continue reading
Gerhaher
It never ceases to amaze me that critics can respond to a specific performance with such different takes. Sometimes I have trouble believing I was at the same concert as these other guys. This morning’s Times review of the recent … Continue reading
A Three-Rattle Week
Even in Berlin, where he has lived for more than a dozen years while conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, you would be hard put to hear Simon Rattle in three different venues in the course of a week. But last week … Continue reading
Bountiful Beethoven
Last week the Berlin Philharmoniker came to Carnegie Hall and played all nine Beethoven symphonies in the course of five nights. Two of the Times’s critics—Anthony Tommasini at the beginning of the cycle, and David Allen in his review at the … Continue reading
Berlin Diary
I was in Berlin for nearly three weeks, so you’re not going to hear about everything I saw or heard. You won’t, for instance, hear about the Telemann Death of Jesus performed with a twenty-first-century Requiem, nor the piano recital accompanied … Continue reading
Simon’s Band
I first came to love music, I mean really love music, by listening to the Berlin Philharmonic during a semester spent in Berlin. I was an avid fan that whole fall, not only attending every concert I could get tickets … Continue reading
Tetzlaff Times Three
In mid-March, as I was leaving the Carnegie Hall concert that Christian Tetzlaff had just given with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, I ran into a couple of friends. “Oh, we should have known we’d see you at this!” they said … Continue reading
Conductors
For the first twenty or thirty years of my concert-going existence, I thought that the composer was everything. And then, a few years back, I began to notice how much difference a conductor could make. But even this realization did … Continue reading