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FallGuide2009

Michael Steinberg, 1928-2009

In Memoriam
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ  |  August 3, 2009

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Michael Steinberg, who died of cancer last Sunday morning in Minneapolis, was one of the great voices raised in defense of high culture, and Boston was lucky that he was based here for so many years.

From 1964 to 1976, he was the Boston Globe's powerfully outspoken and phenomenally well-informed music critic. After a particularly scathing review of a 1969 Boston Symphony Orchestra concert led by the generally worshiped Carlo Maria Giulini — Steinberg wrote that if Danny Kaye and Victor Borge had conducted "with such crazed dislocation of tempo and with such prodigality in expression of tragic suffering and deep knee-bends, the audience would have been in stitches" — the BSO threatened to bar him from Symphony Hall. But the Globe stood by him, and he continued to hold musical performances and programming in Boston to the highest technical, interpretive, and musicological standards — until the BSO co-opted him. He then served as its director of publications and program annotator from 1976 to 1979.

The BSO continued to use his program notes even after he moved on to the San Francisco Symphony (where he was also artistic advisor), Minneapolis (Jorja Fleezanis, that orchestra's concertmaster, was his second wife), and New York Philharmonic orchestras. He maintained his BSO connection as its most popular pre-concert lecturer. His program notes are collected in three Oxford Press volumes (The Symphony, The Concerto, and Choral Masterworks), which are bibles of profoundly insightful and eloquent historical and musical information.

He was a significant mentor to the next generation of Boston critics. (Thank you, Michael! Former Globe and Phoenix critic Richard Buell told me, "He was the most important person in my life outside of my own family.") One could regret that he never completed a long-planned book on Elliott Carter or a collection of E.T.A. Hoffmann translations. But what a generously full and valuable life he has completed now.

Related: Beloved of God, Contertizing, Mixed blessings, More more >
  Topics: News Features , Entertainment, Music, Classical Music,  More more >
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ARTICLES BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ
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    I wasn’t there, but the opening-night dissatisfaction with the Met’s new Tosca was widely reported.
  •   LEON KIRCHNER, 1919–2009  |  September 23, 2009
    Craggy, tender, passionate, witty, rough-edged, lyrical, uncompromising, Leon Kirchner's music, so like the man himself, made an indelible impression. Even in his recent appearance at a 90th-birthday tribute concert at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the old fire and wit, the frankness and the refusal to sentimentalize, were there.
  •   BAROQUE AND BEYOND  |  September 14, 2009
    Ten-best lists usually come at the end of the season, but this year the Phoenix has asked its critics to provide a calendar of 10 events that, at least on paper, might wind up on an end-of-season Top 10. Boston, in case you didn't know it, is a great city for classical music, so it's not easy to keep the list short. But here goes.
  •   MICHAEL MAZUR, 1935 - 2009  |  August 27, 2009
    "He was so alive ," a friend wrote to me a few days after Michael Mazur died, on August 18.
  •   MIDSUMMER MADNESS  |  September 29, 2009
    After a relatively quiet summer, I saw Boston Midsummer Opera's Cosí fan tutte at BU's Tsai Center. Then I raced out to Tanglewood for a Mark Morris program accompanied by Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax, a BSO matinee with Ma, and all six concerts in the annual Festival of Contemporary Music.

 See all articles by: LLOYD SCHWARTZ

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