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
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
Violinists
Musicians are fond of saying that Shostakovich’s compositions only really come to life when they are played before a live audience. It also helps, I’ve found, when they are performed by excellent players. In the last year alone, I’ve been … Continue reading
Lightning Strikes Twice
To attend an astonishingly good concert is always a surprise. If one chooses carefully, one expects competent and even enjoyable performances; but to expect overwhelming delight and reverberating emotional depth would be useless and self-defeating, since these come so rarely. … Continue reading
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