Damian Da Costa

Music Quickens Time
By Daniel Barenboim
Verso, 184 pages, $24.95

Daniel Barenboim, director of the Berlin Staatskapelle and a pianist whose recordings of Beethoven’s Sonatas have become a touchstone of their modern interpretation, has written a slim but substantial new volume that borrows (conveniently enough for the summarizing book reviewer) the sonata’s three-part structure of exposition, development and recapitulation—“not an epic narrative,” as Mr. Barenboim puts it, “but a dramatic juxtaposition.”

In the first three essays, Mr. Barenboim sets out his themes in the tonic key of philosophical speculation. “Sound and Thought,” “Listening and Hearing” and “Freedom of Thought and Interpretation,” as their titles suggest, deal in the phenomenological basics of sound in time, resting on the conclusion that music, as the combined experience of composer, conductor, performer and listener, represents the reconciliation of dialectical opposites: Intellect and emotion resolve into feeling.  read more »

Even over the phone, Philip Burke’s voice radiates an empathy you wouldn’t necessarily expect from an artist famous for his celebrity caricatures. Asked about his greatest strength as an artist, he keeps it simple and direct: “I think it’s my ability to feel a person’s life.”

To see what he means, consider his Observer cover illustration of Hillary Clinton, decked out in the full regalia of Queen Elizabeth I. It’s Hillary as icon, sure, but look closer and you’ll see it’s Hillary as human, too: She emanates power, isolation, suspicion even of those who claim to worship her. The longer you look at her, even on pink newsprint, the more complex and contradictory she seems.  read more »

When Jourdan Urbach took the stage at Carnegie Hall Saturday night, he looked every bit the part of the prodigy. Clad in a matching gold vest and tie, French cuffs flared loosely around large hands that must have identified him early as suited to the violin, the 16-year-old rocked shyly from side to side as he stood before the orchestra, waiting for his moment to join in. When the moment struck, he morphed into an arrow of confidence, suddenly competing with conductor David Bernard for the orchestra's attention. And lucky too for those in the audience: Without Mr. Urbach, the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony had lurched diffidently through their opening piece, Rimsky-Korsakov's Capriccio espagnol.  read more »

On Architecture: Collected
Reflections on a Century
of Chang
By Ada Louise Huxtable
Walker & Co., 496 pages, $35

The question of the day is about public taste, and whether there can any longer be such a thing. When I asked a few of my friends who are young architects what they thought of Ada Louise Huxtable, venerable critic most recently for The Wall Street Journal and for whom The New York Times invented the job of newspaper architecture critic, the response ranged from blank to neutral. One told me her parents had mailed to her clippings of Ms. Huxtable’s Journal pieces when she was studying at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the way parents do when trying earnestly to relate to kids launched far into the realms of professional sophistication.  read more »

Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism
By Bernard-Henri Lévy
Random House, 233 pages, $25

Yes, he’s a celebrity who wears expensive suits. But he’s a real-deal philosopher, too, so let’s put on our thinking caps and review the principles of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s political thought as presented in Left in Dark Times, a manifesto with a subtitle suitable for the barricades, A Stand Against the New Barbarism.  read more »

Tides are turning in the art world this fall. Damien Hirst’s blockbuster auction at Sotheby’s in London confirmed what everybody’s known for a long time: art stars aren’t just artists—they’re branded businesses available for license if you’ve got the cash. As the sainted George W. S. Trow once noted, if there’s one thing purveyors of culture junk have in common with drug dealers, it’s adherence to one sacred ethos: “See ya, don’t wanna be ya!” Mr. Hirst must be thrilled to have gotten those dead animals off his hands, no?

But there is comfort for the afflicted. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s beloved outgoing director spends his last months at the helm presiding over a mighty tribute to none other than Himself: “The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions” (Oct.  read more »

The most exciting story of the fall classical season is the much anticipated opening of (Le) Poisson Rouge in the old Village Gate space on Bleecker Street. O.K., LPR isn’t all classical. But that’s the point: Owners David Handler and Justin Kantor, musicians and composers trained at the Manhattan School of Music, have created a lounge setting for classical and new music: A low stage keeps the musicians close to the audience, and a noisy bar off to the side keeps the scene buzzing during performances. Lincoln Center it ain’t.

LPR is about mixing—classical and pop, visual art and music.  read more »

The $12 Million Stuffed Shark:
The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art
By Don Thompson
Palgrave MacMillan, 256 pages, $24.95

On Sept. 15 and 16, Sotheby’s auctioned off 223 new works by British artist-provocateur Damien Hirst, who raked in $200.7 million (having already, over the course of his relatively brief career, amassed a purported billion—billion—dollar fortune). I know: Your eyes are glazing over at news of yet another record-setting auction of outrageous contemporary art. But that’s because you’ve misplaced the emphasis—it’s not that it’s Damien Hirst or that it’s contemporary, it’s that the works are new, as in produced within the last two years. Mr. Hirst is the first major artist to take his art directly to auction, bypassing the dealers whose function, traditionally, is to introduce artists’ work to the marketplace.  read more »

Antoine’s Alphabet:
Watteau and His World
By Jed Perl
Alfred A. Knopf, 210 pages, $25

Where will Barnes and Noble shelve Jed Perl’s Antoine’s Alphabet? It’s an art book illustrated with gorgeous etchings based on the paintings of Antoine Watteau; it’s a short biography of the painter in the style of the Penguin Lives series, drawing vivid scenes of the artist’s life in 18th-century Paris; it’s a coded memoir of the critic himself, who interrupts musings on his subject with sketches of conversations with “a writer friend” of fierce intelligence (and irritating self-importance). And it’s also, unassumingly, what its title says—a child’s Alphabet: A is for actors (one of Watteau’s pictorial obsessions), B is for backs (whose expressive potential Watteau recognized long in advance of Rodin), and on down the line, mimicking in spirit the quality Mr.  read more »

The Spy’s Bedside Book
Edited by Graham Greene and Hugh Greene
Bantam, 252 pages, $12

While Graham Greene and his brother Hugh were compiling The Spy’s Bedside Book, a medley of vignettes of spycraft drawn from fiction, memoirs and historical documents first published in 1957 and now reissued just in time, it seems, for the return of the Cold War, they stumbled upon the deep explanation for why tales of espionage cast so strong a spell over their readers: "I wonder how many would be able to detect truth from fiction in this anthology," Graham writes in the introduction, "if the editors had not printed the names of the contributors.  read more »

Central Park in the Dark: More Mysteries of Urban Wildlife
By Marie Winn
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 295 pages, $25

Ten years ago, Wall Street Journal reporter Marie Winn told the story of her enchantment with a pair of red-tailed hawks nesting on the ledge of a tony Fifth Avenue co-op in clear view of the Central Park boat pond. Ecstatic birdwatchers kept vigil, generously offering use of their expensive-looking binoculars to all who passed. The story had legs (wings?) and her book, Red-Tails in Love, was a hit. Aside from making Pale Male and Lola (as they were dubbed) into posterbirds for the resurgence of New York’s long-depressed hawk population, Red-Tails did something akin to setting down an oral tradition for the first time.  read more »

A CASE OF EXPLODING MANGOES
By Mohammed Hanif
Alfred A. Knopf, 323 pages, $24  read more »

THE HAKAWATI
By Rabih Alameddine
Alfred A. Knopf, 513 pages, $25.95

The Hakawati, Lebanese-American author Rabih Alameddine’s third novel, is a late entry to a field that includes movies like Pan’s Labyrinth and novels like The Tin Drum—stories that process situations of extreme sadness and moral complexity through the viewpoint of a child. It’s a device with great potential for showing up the childish side of adult politics, and—always the set piece of this genre—how everyday life continues in spite of it all.  read more »

With as many musical genres competing for your attention as there are iPods currently plugged into ears, there’s a huge demand today for aurally inclined curators. What regular person has time to sort through everything?  read more »

THE KONKANS
By Tony D’Souza
Harcourt, 308 pages, $25

In the early 16th century, Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama came ashore on the western coast of India, claiming the land for Portugal and the local people for Christ. The Indians converted by da Gama developed a culture distinct from that of the subcontinent’s Hindus and Muslims. The Konkans eat pork and beef, speak a language derived from Portuguese called Konakani and, in the 500 years since da Gama’s arrival, have evolved a reputation as merchants. Yet their customs retain traditional Hindu elements—Konkan weddings, for example, include Hindu dances.

How do proud Catholics like the Konkans reconcile their devotion to the One True God with India’s dizzying religious and cultural diversity? Same way everyone copes with difference: through a combination of denial and amused contempt. “Hindus, surprisingly, are rather admired by the Konkans,” explains Francisco, the half-Konkan, half-white narrator of Tony D’Souza’s promising second novel.  read more »

ALFRED KAZIN: A BIOGRAPHY
By Richard M. Cook
Yale University Press, 452 pages, $35

With the death of Alfred Kazin in 1998 at the age of 83, the kind of high-end literary journalism that he’d devoted his life to in over a thousand book reviews, an epochal 1942 history of realism in American literature and three memoirs of life among the New York intellectuals, came at last to an end. Kazin’s legacy, like that of his idol Edmund Wilson, consisted almost entirely of occasional pieces on incidental topics aimed at an educated general public, and in brooding memoirs that mixed score-settling and book-chat in even measure.

A freelancer to the last, Kazin never quit hustling for the next book review or fellowship or visiting professor appointment. “Between October 1997 and his death on June 5, 1998,” writes Richard M. Cook in his exhaustively researched biography, “Kazin published five essays in the New York Review of Books, three essays and reviews in The New York Times, and two essays and a poem in The New Republic.”  read more »

Zugzwang falls short of the standard Ronan Bennett set with The Catastrophist, but only if you assume he’s aiming beyond entertainment.  read more »

Has classical music become hip? From the looks of this fall, some of the city’s most traditional venues will be competing with clubs for the downtown crowd. Check out The Berlin in Lights festival (Nov.2 to Nov. 18), which will celebrate Berlin (perhaps the coolest city in the world right now, according to Williamsburg types) in a wide range of events held at Carnegie Hall, the Neue Galerie, MoMA and Goethe-Institut.

Where to begin? Tucked among the lectures, movies and cabaret are a host of classical performances at Carnegie Hall: 26-year-old Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel makes his New York City premiere conducting the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra Ensemble (Nov.  read more »

“Vienna,” the first of the two narrative essays that make up Marc Edmundson’s meditation on the late life and thought of Sigmund Freud, is a tale worthy of a libretto.  read more »

INNER WORKINGS: LITERARY ESSAYS 2000-2005
By J.M. Coetzee
Viking, 304 pages, $25.95

Each of the 21 essays included in Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005 is named for the author whose works it examines, making the collection’s table of contents read like a syllabus. In the first half of the course, J.M. Coetzee lectures on European literature of the first half of the 20th century, in translation from Italian, German, Hungarian and Polish. It’s an honor roll of anomie: the Swiss writer Robert Walser, for example, whose works went largely neglected during his lifetime, the last years of which he spent institutionalized; or the Austrian Robert Musil, whose The Man Without Qualities (1930) chronicled the breakdown of Enlightenment liberalism that prefigured the rise of fascism in Europe.  read more »