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
Filling Carnegie Hall
In the middle of April I heard three chamber-music concerts on the main stage of Carnegie Hall, and they were all, quite frankly, great. The first was the complete Brahms piano quartets, played by a dream ensemble that included Leif Ove … Continue reading
Four Quartets
Not T. S. Eliot’s, but real string-playing musicians. Over the course of less than a month, I recently had the opportunity to hear four first-class quartet groups who were visiting the Bay Area. The string quartet is a strange beast: … Continue reading
A Stupendous Saturday
Living in a place like Berkeley, one can sometimes feel deprived of great music, as if it is all happening somewhere else, in the great capital cities of the world. But I have never, in New York or London or Berlin, had … Continue reading
Architecture
It’s true that I’m writing a biography of the architect Louis Kahn, so I’ve been looking closely at a lot of good architecture (mainly his) over the past few years. But recently I had a series of architectural adventures that had … Continue reading
Biss Bliss
There are certain performers whose concerts I will try to attend no matter what they are playing, and Jonathan Biss is definitely on the list. Last June I heard him in a Beethoven marathon with the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Hall; this … Continue reading
Making a Murderer
Not since I watched Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line, eons ago in a theater, have I been as powerfully affected by a documentary about the miscarriage of U.S. justice. And this time it came right into my house, courtesy of Netflix … Continue reading
Bountiful Beethoven
Last week the Berlin Philharmoniker came to Carnegie Hall and played all nine Beethoven symphonies in the course of five nights. Two of the Times’s critics—Anthony Tommasini at the beginning of the cycle, and David Allen in his review at the … Continue reading
Leila Josefowicz at Zankel
I first learned about Leila Josefowicz eight years ago, shortly before she won her MacArthur award, and because I was working on Shostakovich at the time, I acquired her recording of his notoriously difficult Violin Concerto No. 1. It was a knockout, and I resolved … Continue reading