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: metropolitan opera
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
Hearing It Live
There are lots of obstacles that might keep you at home listening to favorite performances on your music system instead of venturing out to an opera house or a concert hall. Price is one of the big ones, but transportation, cold weather, exhaustion … Continue reading
A Three-Rattle Week
Even in Berlin, where he has lived for more than a dozen years while conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, you would be hard put to hear Simon Rattle in three different venues in the course of a week. But last week … Continue reading
Orientalism on the Stage
By pure chance, I suppose, the first three performances I saw in New York this season were all afflicted with Orientalism, that hokey variety of East-West fusion which Edward Said brought to our collective attention a number of years ago. … Continue reading
Progress
Musically and dramatically, the production of The Rake’s Progress that I saw last night at the Met was practically perfect. From the moment Paul Appleby appeared onstage in the central role of Tom Rakewell—swinging his arms and shuffling his feet … Continue reading
Shostakovich Redux
When you spend years writing a biography of a creative figure and thinking about everything he did, you might expect to be sick of him once the job is over. I thought I might be done with Shostakovich when I … Continue reading
Oops
Three months between error and correction is an awfully long time, and occasionally more than one issue passes before I discover my mistakes, so I’ve decided to use this blog entry to rectify some of the errors I’ve made in … Continue reading
Highlights from October
I was so busy attending things in October that I didn’t get a chance to write about any of them at the time. Now that we’re well into November, I’ve had an opportunity to reflect on the best of what … Continue reading