The Divine Inspiration of Handel’s Messiah

The Divine Inspiration of Handel’s Messiah

Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah By Charles King. Doubleday, 2024. Hardcover, 352 pages, $32.00. Reviewed by Rev. Dr. Karl C. Schaffenburg. Joyeuses Fêtes! as a seasonal greeting is no more silly than “Happy Holidays!”,...
Gentlemen Losers

Gentlemen Losers

Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan By Alex Pappademas & Joan LeMay. University of Texas Press, 2023. Hardcover, 280 pages, $35. Reviewed by Asher Gelzer-Govatos. Steely Dan, those infamously reclusive...
A Gentleman Out of Moscow

A Gentleman Out of Moscow

Goodbye Russia: Rachmaninoff in Exile By Fiona Maddocks. Pegasus Books, 2024. Hardcover, 384 pages, $29.95. Reviewed by Robert Bellafiore. In the last years of Romanov Russia, Sergei Rachmaninoff was enjoying life as a musical giant, composing such titanic hits as the...
Jeanne Demessieux: A Great Organist’s Centenary

Jeanne Demessieux: A Great Organist’s Centenary

By Robert James Stove What makes organists tick? Denis Arnold (1926–1986), British biographer of Bach and Monteverdi, thought that he knew. In 1983 he remarked: “Organists have to be neat men: their mistakes do not, like a doctor’s, quietly die, but are all too...
Salvation Through Compassion?

Salvation Through Compassion?

Wagner’s Parsifal: The Music of Redemption by Roger Scruton. Allen Lane, 2020. Hardcover, 208 pages, £20.00 Reviewed by Paul Krause “We have been called not to explore the world, but to rescue it. In doing so we emerge from our trials and conflicts in full possession...