Los Angeles Review of Books, Sept. 15, 2020
“KNOWN TO MANY as the jazzy American tunesmith of such beloved standards as ‘Autumn in New York,’ ‘April in Paris,’ and ‘Taking a Chance on Love’ (from the Broadway musical Cabin in the Sky), Vernon Duke had another side. As Vladimir Dukelsky (his real name), he composed respectable ‘classical’ ballets, symphonies, concerti, sonatas, oratorios, and chamber music.”READ MORE
Boston Symphony Orchestra interview conducted at Symphony Hall, Apr. 3, 2015
“How did you first come to hear and experience the music of Shostakovich? ‘When I was about five years old I entered music school, first studying piano and then trumpet. I think I was around six years old when I was introduced to Shostakovich’s music, it was part of what we studied and played.'”READ MORE
NY Times Book Review, CENTAUR, The Life and Art of Ernst Neizvestny. By Albert Leong. Aug. 25, 2002
“ON my first visit to the Soviet Union more than 30 years ago, our group of American college students was taken by proud local hosts to a recently constructed memorial on the site of an infamous Nazi concentration camp at Salaspils, near Riga, Latvia. At uneven intervals, as if scattered by unhappy fate, giant concrete statues of human figures towered over what had been the desolate mass grave for thousands of victims from all over Eastern Europe.”READ MORE
NY Times Book Review, THIS I CANNOT FORGET The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin’s Widow. By Anna Larina. Mar. 21, 1993
“THEIR romance had all the ingredients of a Communist fairy tale: Anna Larina was 20, a vivacious beauty with a gift for poetry. The daughter of a leading Bolshevik intellectual, she had been dandled on Lenin’s knee. Nikolai Bukharin was 45, the athletic and charismatic golden boy of the revolution.”READ MORE
NY Times Book Review, THE NEW SHOSTAKOVICH By Ian MacDonald. Nov. 25, 1990
“SO what’s ‘new’ about ‘the new Shostakovich’? It’s that this hugely gifted and prolific composer, long perceived as a loyal Soviet subject dutifully hymning the glories of Communism, in fact despised the inhuman totalitarian regime foisted upon poor battered Russia by Lenin and his unscrupulous Bolsheviks.”READ MORE
NY Times Book Review, DOSTOEVSKY The Stir of Liberation 1860-1865. By Joseph Frank. Aug. 31, 1986
“IT may not be stretching a point to say that being sent to prison was the best thing that ever happened to Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The alternative, death by firing squad, was certainly less appealing.”READ MORE
NY Times, May 23, 1982
“Liviu Ciulei, Rumanian-born artistic director of the renowned Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, is the first to admit that he has never been an opera fan. ‘Usually when I’m at the opera I sit in my box and laugh,’ he confided with a smile on a recent rainy afternoon.”READ MORE