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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Author Archives: Wendy Lesser
Wagnerian Time
Whether you find it easy or difficult to lend yourself to Wagner’s overwhelmingly powerful agenda—and I am still not sure where I stand on this question—you will be aware of having to alter something in yourself to accommodate his patently … Continue reading
Programming
I would have gone to hear Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Timeno matter what else was on the program. But by putting it together with other French twentieth-century pieces by Darius Milhaud, Pierre Boulez, and Maurice Ravel, the Chamber … Continue reading
Slings and Arrows
Everyone who has seen at least two seasons of The Wire considers it the greatest television ever made. And it is. But a close runner-up, to my mind, is Slings and Arrows, a program about a group of Shakespearean actors that ran … Continue reading
In the Oddest Places
Over the past month, I’ve been finding the best music in places where I didn’t necessarily expect it, and less good music in places where I did. When this oddity occurred once, it didn’t seem worth remarking on, but now … Continue reading
Vertigo, Etcetera
I made a special effort to catch what was being billed as the “New York premiere” of the Vertigo Quartet at the February 3rd Schneider Concert, part of a series held on Sunday afternoons at the New School. Actually, this … Continue reading
Short Takes
During a single week last month, I took my Hunter College freshmen to two dance events: a rehearsal of Mark Morris’s Mozart Dances at the Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn, and one of the premiere performances of Christopher Wheeldon’s Morphoses/The … Continue reading
Music Audiences
After many visits to Avery Fisher Hall, I’ve decided that the real problem with the New York Philharmonic lies neither with the orchestra nor with the performance space, but with the audience. (There may be a secondary problem involving the conductor, … Continue reading
A Month of Performances
It occurred to me that it would be useful to chronicle the live performances I saw in New York during just the past four weeks. March 2007 was not an unusual month, in that the number of events I attended … Continue reading
Teaching the Arts
This past fall I taught a course called “New York and the Arts” at Hunter. My students were freshmen in the CUNY Honors College, which meant that, on the basis of their academic promise, they had all been granted a … Continue reading