Artist Features

“He’s a phenomenon – unlike anyone else”  In 1967 I had just begun timpani and percussion lessons at Trinity College of Music with one of the most venerated players and teachers in the UK music profession. Lewis Pocock had been Principal Percussion and then Principal Timpani in Sir Thomas Beecham’s famous virtuoso Royal Philharmonic Orchestra,…

Joseph Sigmund Weitz was born in the Bronx in 1923 to Arnold Weitz and Bertha Bayer, a Jewish-Austrian emigre couple who ran a successful dairy business on the Lower East Side in Manhattan. Four years later they were blessed with a second child, a daughter Sarah (“Sherry”).  Theirs was a childhood steeped in culture, both…

Film portraits of musicians have been around for the best part of nearly a century – but from the time more than 50 years ago when acclaimed film director, violinist and writer Bruno Monsaingeon began his quest to capture some of the world’s most exceptional performers on camera, he was taking a new multidimensional line…

Had his life not been cruelly cut short in a plane crash at age 39, Dan Weiner might have become as famous as his photographs. An extraordinary talent, his remarkable legacy is built upon a mere span of 10 years. Among that body of work is one of the most recognizable album covers – in…

When a singer has been dead for less than fifty years – leaving her in the limbo of being neither a safely ‘historical’ figure nor a strictly ‘contemporary’ one – the strength of her enduring reputation can be undecided. And that’s been my experience of Jennifer Vyvyan, the English soprano who was a serious star…

Born in Brooklyn on 15 February 1925 to a German immigrant couple, the long-lived Curt John Witt would grow up in the Bronx. The twin poles of his childhood were the family radio and the local library, his burgeoning imagination captivated by music and the visual arts in equal measure. Glenn Miller’s rendition of “Sunrise…

I was just three months away from my 12th birthday when I first – and last – saw Sir Thomas Beecham conduct live in the flesh. It was in April 1960, and unknown to anyone including Sir Thomas this was to be his final appearance in London and his penultimate concert anywhere. I was too…

Introduction: Musical Genealogy and the Flute  Great instrumentalists generally have distinct musical personalities. Such is certainly the case with William Kincaid and Marcel Moyse who many regard as two of the greatest flutists of the twentieth century. Through their performing and teaching, individuals of such stature establish unique playing traditions that are carried forward by…

Luboshutz & Nemenoff: Piano Duo Extraordinaire Pierre Luboshutz (1890–1971) and Genia Nemenoff (1905–1989) were, in many ways, very similar—musicians from Russian-Jewish backgrounds who had found success in America. But their differences were significant. Antecedents  For two generations, Pierre Luboshutz’s forebears had made a living—albeit a modest one— in the music business. Grandfather Luboshutz (actually Luboshitz…

My earliest memory of the legendary tenor Jon Vickers has remained blazingly vividly with me for 61 years now, wholly undiminished with time – and most especially as I had received such a shock when he sang for the first time in the performance of February 27th 1961. This was the second night of a…

The extreme exigencies of the Second World- War made for strange bedfellows, with the counter poles of American capitalism and Soviet communism paradoxically aligned to defeat a common enemy: Nazi Germany. Ideological differences were temporarily set aside and Russian music, and in particular that of Dmitri Shostakovich, enjoyed a tremendous vogue in American concert halls.…

Cellist, oboist, photographer, and painter Adrian Siegel was born to a Russian Jewish immigrant couple on 17 July 1898. They lived in what was then the Jewish capital of America: New York’s Lower East Side, a crowded and extraordinary community of mostly Eastern European and Russian Jews – teaming, thriving, industrious, inventive, but a life…

Ricardo Odnoposoff Born, Bueno Aires, 24 February 1914 – Died, Vienna, 26 October 2004 A Russian Jewish émigré, businessman and passionate Wagner enthusiast, Moisés Odnoposoff named his first child, born in Buenos Aires on 24 February 1914, Richard.Although Moisés (Mauricio in his adopted homeland of Argentina) dabbled on the violin (an unrequited love) and his…

On 3 October 1918, a young violinist named Mery Zentay succumbed to influenza, dying in her Manhattan apartment only 4 days after contracting the virus. She had ventured to America to aid her family’s business in Budapest. Her death a little over a century ago at the tender age of 21 seems especially poignant today…