Medicine & Opera

Articles, page 2

Samuel Ramey

August 8, 2026

Samuel Ramey occupies a special place among American opera singers. While he’s appeared in several posts on this site, I have not yet devoted an entire article to his exceptional career. At a time when international operatic stardom was still largely associated with tenors and sopranos, he became one of the rare basses whose name […]

LCO Fall Concert – Program Notes

August 5, 2026

The Lubbock Chamber Orchestra will present its Fall concert on September 19, 2026 at the Crickets Theater. The notes for the performance are below. They may be modified for inclusion in the program booklet. Tickets may be purchased here. Mozart: Serenade No. 13 for Strings in G Major, K. 525 (“Eine kleine Nachtmusik”) Few works […]

Carl Furillo – The Reading Rifle

August 1, 2026

Carl Anthony Furillo was one of the indispensable members of the great Brooklyn Dodgers teams remembered as the “Boys of Summer.” A powerful, accurate-throwing right fielder and a remarkably dependable hitter, he spent his entire 15-year major-league career with the Dodgers, accompanying them from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. He was less celebrated than Jackie Robinson, […]

Fifteen One-Aria Operas

July 29, 2026

My subject is operas that are known almost entirely because of one hit aria. Without the tune, they would be virtually invisible. Below are 15 arias that I think fit the description just given. Catalani’s Ebben? Ne andrò lontana from the first act of La Wally is probably the supreme example of the one-aria opera. […]

Prokofiev and Shostakovich – Masterworks 1

July 24, 2026

The program notes for the Lubbock Symphony Orchestra’s first Masterworks concert of the 2026-27 season (September 3) are below. The text that appears in the program may be modified from that which appears here. Tickets can be purchased online. The Composers and the Stalinist Regime Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich were the two greatest Soviet […]

Robots on the Loose

July 23, 2026

OpenAI reported that two of its artificial intelligence models broke out of a test environment, accessed the internet, and hacked Hugging Face. Hugging Face is a provider of open-source AI tools. Such an event is not supposed to be possible under the controls that are said to be imposed on AI systems. It brought back […]

Cyclospora in the Salad Bowl

July 18, 2026

The United States is experiencing an unusually large outbreak of cyclosporiasis, a prolonged diarrheal illness caused by the microscopic parasite Cyclospora cayetanensis. Although the disease is rarely fatal, it can produce weeks of watery diarrhea, fatigue, anorexia, abdominal distress, volume contraction, and weight loss. Its tendency to disappear briefly and then return makes it particularly […]

Naturalizing History – Book Review

July 15, 2026

Stephen Balch is a distinguished scholar and teacher. He has taught at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and at Texas Tech University, where he was the director of the Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. He was also the founding president of the National Association of Scholars. He […]

LSO Concert Celebrating America’s 250th

July 12, 2026

A video of the second half of the Lubbock Symphony’s May 23, 2026 concert is below. The conductor is David Cho, the LSO’s music director.

The AIs and I – We Answer the Same Question

July 11, 2026

I asked two AIs – ChatGPT and Gemini – the same question: In the pantheon of great Italian artists of all kinds, who are the four greatest? First, the answer I came up with and a brief reason for my choice. Here’s what ChatGPT said when asked the above question: (Notice the first person singular […]

Charles Craig – English tenor

July 7, 2026

Charles Craig was born in London on December 3, 1919, and died on January 23, 1997. He came from a large, unmusical family – he was the youngest of fifteen children. As a child, he was fond of the recordings of Enrico Caruso, though he didn’t consider a career as a singer. Craig worked in […]

July 4th and the Hazy Past

July 4, 2026

As the nation marks the 250th anniversary of its founding, I found myself musing on its 200th anniversary. My life has been long enough that I was a mature man when the bicentennial occurred. My wife and I were driving through the south of Germany on our way to Geneva with no schedule and no […]

Al Jolson

July 1, 2026

Al Jolson (1886-1950) was not merely the man who appeared in The Jazz Singer. He was one of the central figures in the creation of modern American popular entertainment. He was born Asa Yoelson in Lithuania, usually given as May 26, 1886, though the exact date is uncertain. His father, Moses Yoelson, was a rabbi […]

Why Socialism Has More Lives Than the Phoenix

June 26, 2026

Socialism, in its purest and most advanced form, is a political and economic system in which the means of production and the distribution of goods and services are owned, controlled, or directed by the government. In one form or another, it has been around for more than two centuries. It eventually disappears or degenerates into […]

Five Preludes

June 23, 2026

The prelude to the beginning of an opera or to one of its acts differs from an overture in several ways. A prelude is usually, though not always, shorter. It is not a compendium of the work’s hit tunes. It tends to be less formal and more atmospheric. It typically runs directly into the action […]

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