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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Tag Archives: cal performances
Looking at Love Again
A couple of weeks ago, I was able to get another glimpse of Mark Morris’s delightful tribute to Burt Bacharach songs, The Look of Love, which was playing for four days at BAM. This was actually my third encounter with … Continue reading
Rainy Days and Live Music
January was a dry spell—not so much in terms of the California winter rains (we had the normal level) but in terms of live concerts I could attend. I wasted away at home, watching endless Netflix serials, some of which … Continue reading
The Look of Love
Like Pepperland, the evening-length work set to Beatles songs that Mark Morris created a few years ago, Morris’s new Burt Bacharach production, The Look of Love, is pure pleasure. I went twice when it appeared at Berkeley’s Cal Performances this past weekend, and I … Continue reading
Musicians from Marlboro
I attend a lot of good chamber music concerts, but very few great ones. It’s hard to predict in advance which ones will be top of the line, because so many elements are involved. The musicians have to be good, of … Continue reading
Available Light
In a 1986 interview, Jerome Robbins attempted to define choreography by saying that it was concerned with not only the way dancers move, “but the way they move in space— because that’s what ballets are about, which is that volume of space which … 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
Four Nights of Music
The Bay Area has been a hotbed of concerts recently, and I’ve been out four nights in a row to something good. This would be a record of sorts even for New York, and in my part of California it’s … Continue reading