Music Journalism

I have done much freelance published writing over the years, most of it related to classical music. I have written concert criticism for three major daily newspapers: first the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, then for several years the Toronto Star, and later Canada’s Globe and Mail. I was also a weekly broadcast critic for Toronto’s CJRT-FM, a superb fine arts station in its day. More recently I have been a contributing editor and essayist for the American piano magazine Clavier, and a reviewer for Toronto’s WholeNote classical music magazine.

As a program note writer, I have written for many prominent organizations, among them the Los Angeles Philharmonic and LA Chamber Orchestra, the Baltimore Symphony, Carnegie Hall, UC-Berkeley, San Francisco Performances, etc. I have written liner notes for Nonesuch Records and for the audiophile label Sheffield Lab (for their noted “Moscow Sessions” releases with the Moscow Philharmonic).

My recent passion has been the development of interactive listening workshops (called Getting Inside Classical Music), intended to promote intelligent lay conversations about this wonderful yet abstract art form. I have been leading such guided learning sessions to acclaim in both Canada and the US for the past decade: they owe their genesis to the LIFE Institute, a continuing-education division of Ryerson University in Toronto.