In Praise of Moral Fire

My new book Moral Fire is praised in today’s Boston Globe by Jeremy Eichler for its “elegant and warmly sympathetic” portrait of Henry Higginson, who invented, owned, and operated the Boston Symphony. I’m fortunate to have my book reviewed by Jeremy – and Boston is fortunate to be the rare American city with a classical-music press of stature.

I visit Boston in early October to give the Elson Lecture at Harvard on rethinking orchestras as purveyors of the humanities – that’s 5:15 pm Tuesday October 9. And the next day, also at Harvard, I take part in a conversation about the future of classical music in the US – with Jeremy, Lloyd Schwartz, and Boston Symphony CEO Mark Volpe.

That orchestras are moving toward “contextualized” programming – a preoccupation of this blog — seems to me both necessary and indisputable. Stay tuned.