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Posts published by “David Yearsley”

Belafonte In The Sun

After the first installment of my planned two-part tribute to Harry Belafonte, who died a month ago at the age of 96, two weeks of…

Eurovisionaries

The Eurovision Song Contest has long burst the geographically borders seemingly staked out by its name. Yet the international spectacle hardly makes a blip on…

Coronation Blues

Not only the living were listening in Westminster Abbey last Saturday. The dead heard the music too. Among the legion of once famous, wealthy, and…

Belafonte Rules The Roost

Arrayed behind the twenty-one-year-old Harry Belafonte on the night of his unlikely debut as a singer in January of 1949 was a quartet of modern…

NATO’S Hymn Ain’t Finished Yet

In an April 4th ceremony in the vast and bleak plaza in front of NATO’s $1 billion, 250 square meter Brussels headquarters conducted in the…

Sounding Out Renfield

In the movie business typecasting can be as much of a curse for composers as for actors. Marco Beltrami made his name in Hollywood with…

Bach Blows

For at least as long as people have talked about the weather, they have made music about it—from rain dances to pastoral symphonies, from the…

Falstaff & The Whale

Not a Fat Tuesday, but a Fat Weekend. On Saturday morning the Metropolitan Opera simulcast of Verdi’s last opera, Falstaff. On Sunday night a home…

Heavy Metal

I spent several summers on my grandfather’s berry farm in the Skagit Valley sixty miles north of Seattle. To irrigate his water-hungry crops, he had…

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