Cynthia Peck
Cynthia Peck is originally from Southern California, but she does not miss the sun. She lived in Tokyo for a decade, and she does miss the food. Now the Konzerthaus and Musikverein are her main living rooms, as are a few select restaurants around town. Trained in Vienna as a professional cellist, she also works at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, translates and edits lots of books about Buddhist epistemology and Austrian history, and is thinking about apprenticing as a chef. What she enjoys most is writing about music.
“Supersaturated with Electricity”: Anticipation for Arnold Schönberg Anniversary Exhibition
Twenty years of the Arnold Schönberg Center and an exhibit on Jung-Wien, Vienna’s fin-de-siècle creative wave“New music is never beautiful on first acquaintance.” For many, this remark by Arnold Schoenberg, made in a radio...
Fame and Fable: Composer Ignaz Pleyel’s Forgotten Legacy
On composer Ignaz Pleyel and a tiny museum less than an hour from Vienna.It’s a story that sounds like sardoodledom – a contrived plot, improbable characters and a good measure of melodrama. That’s the...
Silence! Or What To Do on International Noise Awareness Day
Thoughts about music in a raucous world and International Noise Awareness Day.The concert halls in Vienna are phenomenal spaces. You might think I’m talking about the music. But what flabbergasts me is how quiet...
The Millennials of the Cuarteto Casals Present a two-weekend Cycle of the Complete String...
Some might find it astonishing that the string quartets by Beethoven continue to be a defining edifice in the music world.But once again, there is proof of their endurance: The Cuarteto Casals has chosen...
Is Music Composed Before 1961 old?
The Klangforum’s Festliche Tage Alter Musik – with works composed between 1908 and 1961 – show us how old (and beautiful) modern music really is.It’s like needing reading glasses: the closer something is, the harder...
If you Love Classical Music, Keep Your CD Player on Hand
The compact disc is still a viable archival medium, especially for classical musicI just read a Japanese best-seller about cleaning. The basic premise is that if you reduce your belongings to a perfect minimum...
Wunderkind or not, Vienna’s Amateur Orchestras Give you a Stage
A plethora of orchestras for non-professionals makes Vienna a paradise for amateur musicYou took piano lessons and then you quit. The lessons were because of your mother, quitting was because it got boring. Such...
At the Theater an der Wien René Jacobs Does The Magic Flute
Enchanting and confusing, Die Zauberflöte returns to the house it helped buildHowever you look at it, the story is confusing. Somehow, Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) is a fairy tale: There’s a dragon,...
L’Orient Serves up Savory Morrocan in Leopoldstadt
The cuisine of Morocco at L’Orient combines warm spices with a carefully designed spaceIn Arabic, khattat means calligrapher, the scribe whose perfectly formed lines transform text into art. A similar transformation is happening at...
