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
A Reopened Carnegie Hall
On Thursday night I took a friend to Carnegie Hall to hear Leonidas Kavakos and Yuja Wang play a concert of Bach, Busoni, and Shostakovich. My friend hadn’t heard live music in nearly two years, and she was utterly thrilled to be back … Continue reading
A Random Opera Thought
I’m listening to the Elisabeth Schwarzkopf recording of Così fan tutte and am struck by the same thought I always have when hearing or seeing this opera: How is it that Mozart’s greatest music belongs to his most hateful plot? … Continue reading
Esa-Pekka Times Three
People I know were delighted when they learned, a couple of years ago, that Esa-Pekka Salonen had agreed to take over the leadership of the San Francisco Symphony. I too would have been delighted if I had known then what … Continue reading
Joy, Delight, and Jeremy Denk
Okay, granted it’s been fifteen months since anyone in San Francisco was able to attend a live concert in Davies Symphony Hall. Granted that we were all starved for a real musical performance—not live-streaming, not carefully curated videos of past pinnacles, but … Continue reading
Back in Berlin!
I’ve been here a little over a week now, and for the first time in seven or eight months, I am getting to hear live music again. It is so thrilling that I can barely analyze or even fully take … Continue reading
More Reading Matter
On the advice of one of Threepenny‘s long-term subscribers, I have started reading The Magic Mountain. I would say re-reading, but I never managed to make it through this massive Thomas Mann novel before. Though I am an immense fan … Continue reading
The Mirror and the Light
If you have not yet read Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, now is the time to start. And time is what you have now, right? Wolf Hall, the first book in the series, features the profound effects of the plague in … Continue reading
The last time I was at the Met…
Since the Metropolitan Opera—not to mention the Metropolitan Museum and anything else with Metropolitan or New York or City in its title—is on indeterminate hiatus during the current crisis, I thought I would reflect on the last opera I saw … Continue reading
Beethoven and the Danes
All concert attendance is a betting game, but some bets are riskier than others. Earlier this month, I bet on something I thought would surely pay off: I traveled to New York from California just to hear the Danish String … Continue reading
Photography Heaven
It seems unbelievable that ten years have already passed since Pier 24 opened its doors in San Francisco. Perhaps that’s because this great venue for looking at photography remains so exciting, and so welcome, that it still feels like a recent addition to … Continue reading