Lloyd Schwartz
Lloyd Schwartz is the classical music critic for NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross.
In addition to his role on Fresh Air, Schwartz is the Senior Editor of Classical Music for the web-journal New York Arts and Contributing Arts Critic for WBUR's the ARTery. He is the author of four volumes of poems: These People; Goodnight, Gracie; Cairo Traffic; and Little Kisses (University of Chicago Press, 2017). A selection of his Fresh Air reviews appears in the volume Music In—and On—the Air. He is the co-editor of the Library of the America's Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters and the editor of the centennial edition of Elizabeth Bishop's Prose, published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2011.
In 1994, Schwartz was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. He is the Frederick S. Troy Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston and teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing.
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Callas, who died in 1977, was known for her ability to merge musical notes with complex feelings. Now Warner Classics has released a box set of her live recordings — including 20 complete operas.
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Freire plays tribute to the noted German composer on his new album. Music critic Lloyd Schwartz doesn't always love Brahms, but he loves this recording.
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Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen explores questions of time, memory, nature and human isolation. His recent collaboration with soprano and conductor Barbara Hannigan has garnered worldwide attention.
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The inaugural show at the Metropolitan Museum's Met Breuer branch raises the question of what makes a finished work of art. Critic Lloyd Schwartz calls it "an astonishing gathering of masterpieces."
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When his mother was turning 90, music critic Lloyd Schwartz wrote poems that put her memories into verse. Composer Mohammed Fairouz set three of the poems to music on the new recording, No Orpheus.
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The opera, by the late composer Maurice Ravel, spins a modern fairy tale about a naughty child at bedtime. Critic Lloyd Schwartz reviews a new recording of it by conductor Seiji Ozawa.
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In 1955 and '56, NBC aired live telecasts of the Broadway hit Peter Pan, starring Mary Martin. Critic Lloyd Schwartz calls the performances, now available on Blu-ray, a "tribute to freedom and youth."
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A two-CD set featuring performers from the Lyric Stage of Irving, Texas, revives the complete score of the 1954 musical, The Golden Apple. Critic Lloyd Schwartz calls it a "game-changing" recording.
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Lloyd Schwartz discusses the timeless appeal of the late choreographer George Balanchine. "[He] was our Shakespeare. ... watching a Balanchine ballet is like watching music come alive," he says.
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In the 1940s, recording engineers perfected new sound techniques that were used in World War II — and which launched a hi-fi revolution. Lloyd Schwartz reviews the new 53-CD Decca box set.