No one has ever become world-famous by playing the oboe. Although the instrument has an integral role in the orchestral ecosystem—every ensemble tunes to its piercing A—the sweet-and-sour tang of its sound limits its popularity as a solo voice, particularly in comparison with the mellifluousness of the flute or the clarinet. To be sure, classical music aficionados can reel off the names of significant oboists past and present: the pioneering British virtuoso Léon Goossens; the French-born Marcel Tabuteau, who exerted a vast influence on American oboe playing during his long tenure with the Philadelphia Orchestra; and the contemporary Swiss oboist, composer, and conductor Heinz Holliger, who has greatly expanded the instrument’s repertory. Yet none quite counts as a household name.
The forty-year-old American oboist James Austin Smith, who recently presented “Hearing Memory,” an adventurous program of East German music, at National Sawdust, in Brooklyn, has made his path all the more challenging by choosing to work outside the orchestral cocoon. Someone with his high level of training—he studied at Northwestern University, the Yale School of Music, and the Leipzig Hochschule für Musik und Theater—might have been expected to make the rounds of orchestra auditions, in the hope of winning a post in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or the like. Smith has remained independent, although in 2017 he found a measure of stability by assuming a teaching post at Stony Brook University.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der November 20, 2023-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der November 20, 2023-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
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INSIDE JOB-"Hit Man"
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase \"the banality of evil,\" popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as \"This Gun for Hire\" (1942) and \"Murder by Contract\" (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil.
WHATEVER YOU SAY
Rereading Jenny Holzer, at the Guggenheim.
SUBCONSCIOUSLY YOURS
Does every generation get the Freud it deserves?
BY A WHISKER
Louis Wain and the reinvention of the cat.
Beyond Imagining
Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, and Bridget, who had been lunching together for half a century, joined in later years by Ilka, Hope, and, occasionally, Lucinella, had agreed without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on.
STATES OF PLAY
Can advocates use state supreme courts to preserve-and perhaps expand-constitutional rights?
THE LONG RIDE
The surf legend Jock Sutherland's unlikely life.
ARE WE DOOMED?
A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through.
GOD EXPLAINS THE RULES OF HIS NEW BOARD GAME
Guys, want to play this new board game? It’s called Life. No, it’s not “one of God’s impossible-to-understand games that take three hours to learn.” It’ll be fun, I promise!
RED LINE
With the election approaching, the U.S. and Mexico wrangle over border policy.