Author Archives: Wendy Lesser

A Month of Great Piano

The piano is not my instrument, normally. I don’t just mean I never learned to play it (though that too is true: my childhood music lessons were on the violin). What I really mean is that I don’t seek out piano concerts … Continue reading

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Fall for Dance

Every fall, over the course of two or three weeks, New Yorkers get treated to a generous helping of dance at the hallowed City Center. This Moorish extravaganza on West 55th Street was the original home of the New York City … Continue reading

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The Good Teslas

Forget Elon Musk and his super-fancy cars. He may be making an embarrassing hash of his company at the moment, but he is not the only claimant to the name.  There is quite a wonderful group of string players operating … Continue reading

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Serendipity

Part One: This part of the story begins in 2007, when I first heard a very young quartet group, the Vertigo Quartet, play Shostakovich’s Twelfth. I had heard all fifteen Shostakovich quartets in a cycle played the year before, during … Continue reading

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Russian Music

It’s not often you get to go to a chamber music concert of entirely unfamiliar pieces and have them all turn out to be good. But I had that experience last Saturday night at Music@Menlo’s “St. Petersburg” concert. The program even … Continue reading

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Summer Surprise

First of all, I apologize for the length of time between my last post and this one.  I’ve been in Scandinavia, a most delightful and enlightening place, which I previously knew only from decades of Nordic noir reading and television-watching. … Continue reading

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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

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Great Performers

In this wintry New York spring, I have thus far managed to attend two Great Performers concerts at Lincoln Center. Both of them, not at all to my surprise, completely lived up to the series name. The first, on March 28, featured my favorite … Continue reading

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Heaven

One of the high points of my spring visits to Carnegie Hall, these past few years, has been the annual performance by the English Concert of a Handel opera. It is the closest thing to a sure-fire ticket there is, … Continue reading

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February Round-Up

Given that it’s the shortest month of the year, this February contained a surprising number of excellent performances. I will return to some of these at a later point, when I write about them (or aspects of them) in the print … Continue reading

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