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
Bell & Jackiw
I know it sounds like the name of one of those semi-shady Dickensian firms of solicitors, but my title actually refers to the two star performers in last weekend’s events at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. In two separate programs presented by Cal … Continue reading
Comparative Beethoven
A fascinating experiment is now underway at Alice Tully Hall. Under the auspices of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, six different quartet groups have been enlisted to present all of Beethoven’s works for string quartet in the course of … Continue reading
But Is It Opera?
This question was raised, in my own mind and that of several other audience members I spoke to, by the Metropolitan Opera’s admittedly terrific new production of Leos Janacek’s last operatic work, From the House of the Dead. Based on the Dostoyevsky … 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
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