
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.
-
Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz reviews The Rodgers & Hammerstein Collection, a 12-disc DVD set of musicals created by composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II.
-
Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz reviews three new releases of live recordings by the late mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson: John Harbison's North and South; Peter Liberson's Neruda Songs; and Rilke Songs.
-
It might come as a surprise that such superstar conductors as Claudio Abbado, Simon Rattle, and Daniel Barenboim think that most important thing going on in the world of classical music is not taking place in one of the European capitals but in Venezuela.
-
Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz has an appreciation of mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who died Monday at her home in Santa Fe at the age of 52 after a long illness.
-
Director and choreographer Busby Berkeley was noted for Hollywood musicals featuring lots of scantily clad show girls filmed from overhead in intricate kaleidoscopic patterns. After seeing some of these films again in a new DVD collection, our critic notices a connection between Berkeley and the avant-garde artists of an earlier generation.
-
American opera visionary Sarah Caldwell founded the Opera Company of Boston in 1958. The company's principal prima donna was Beverly Sills, and Placido Domingo was an unknown young tenor when he first sang with the company. Caldwell died on March 23 at the age of 82.
-
Several recent DVD releases feature great black entertainers of the 20th century. For classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz, his favorites feature the great tap dance team of Harold and Fayard Nicholas.
-
The 1951 film version of the Offenbach opera The Tales of Hoffmann, now on DVD, is recognized as a masterpiece of darkly fantastical storytelling from the British team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
-
A disc devoted to concert music by Leonard Bernstein is among four recent releases from conductor Marin Alsop, the new director of the Baltimore Symphony. The recordings show Alsop handling Brahms with the London Symphony Orchestra, and two Kurt Weill symphonies with the Bournemouth Symphony.
-
Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz is also a horror movie fan. He reviews a new DVD collection of the horror films of producer Val Lewton. The films include The Leopard Man, Curse of the Cat People, and I Walked with a Zombie, along with six other films.