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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Category Archives: The Lesser Blog
Mozart and More Mozart
What could be nicer? Two nights in a row listening to Mozart at Carnegie Hall—first an intimate Zankel concert featuring Emmanuel Ax and The Knights, suitably adored by the assembled aficionados; next a solo recital by Yunchan Lim in the … Continue reading
3 x 18
In retrospect, I wonder what possessed me when I arranged to hear Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians played three times in a row, over a three-and-a-half-hour span, at the Park Avenue Armory. Well, to be honest, I know what … Continue reading
Takács and Denk
Ah, to be back at Carnegie Hall! Like European aristocrats, intellectuals, and bohemians of the early twentieth century, I am privileged to participate in a Season, which really only gets started when I attend my first Carnegie concert of the … Continue reading
Proske’s Macbeth
Let me start by saying that the music was terrific. A number of times last night, as I sat watching Louisa Proske’s new production of Verdi’s Macbeth (now running at the Metropolitan Opera), I was struck by the beauty of … Continue reading
Tragedy and Celebration
I am at least as big a Gustavo Dudamel fan as the next person, as my years of positive reviews demonstrate. But enough is enough. The New York Philharmonic is now turning him into the poster boy for music—literally so … Continue reading
An Excerpt from Berlin Before and After
(I wanted to give you a little foretaste of the book that’s coming out on September 8.) They’re called Stolpersteine, or “stumble-stones,” but it’s not actually that easy to stumble on them. By this I mean not only that one … Continue reading
Notes to Berlin Before and After
This post will be of interest only to those who buy the digital edition of Berlin Before and After, which omits the Notes section due to complicated formatting reasons. The print edition includes all of this material at the back. … Continue reading
Touting My Berlin Book
It’s embarrassing but unavoidable, since the world of modern publishing has now assigned to authors the job of being their own publicists. Anyway, here I go: In just over two weeks, on September 8, a book that I’ve been working … Continue reading
New York Roundup
I’ve just had a week in New York doing exactly what I wanted to do every day. In the evenings, that meant attending Mark Morris performances (always a deep pleasure) and having dinner with friends (ditto). In the daytimes, I … Continue reading
Beethoven’s Ninth
It was like medicine. After all the horrible headlines and other political realities of our time, the symphony itself felt like something else: a message from a better world, a clue that there was hope after all. And if the … Continue reading