Arts Global

Bernard Jacobson, until recently a Contributing Editor of Fanfare Magazine, has spent periods as music critic of the Chicago Daily News, visiting professor of music at Roosevelt University in Chicago, director of Southern Arts in Winchester, England, promotion director for Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers, program annotator and musicologist for the Philadelphia Orchestra (where he worked for eight years with Riccardo Muti and created the orchestra's chamber-music series), artistic director of the Residentie Orkest in The Hague and artistic adviser to the North Netherlands Orchestra. He took over responsibility for program notes and pre-concert lectures for the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia beginning with the 2001-2002 season, frequently writes program notes for Carnegie Hall, and reviews regularly on the Internet at musicweb-international.com. Aside from music criticism, he reviews restaurants for his local newspaper, the Kitsap Sun.

Born in London in 1936, Mr Jacobson studied philosophy, history, and classics at Oxford. In addition to books on Brahms and on conducting, his publications include A Polish Renaissance (a study of the music of Panufnik, Lutoslawski, Penderecki, and Górecki, published in 1996 by Phaidon Press), articles and reviews including entries in Encyclopaedia Britannica and The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, a booklet documenting Carnegie Hall's 2000 Perspectives series in celebration of Daniel Barenboim's 50th year on the concert stage and translations from ten languages. He is currently working on a study of the music of Panufnik and on a memoir covering a critical career spanning nearly half a century. Mr Jacobson's English version of Siegfried Matthus's Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke, presented by Glyndebourne Touring Opera in 1993, has also been produced in New York; he has translated Matthus's Judith for a Santa Fe Opera production and Hans Werner Henze's La Cubana for its English premiere at Sadler's Wells Theatre. His poetry has been set to music by the American composer Richard Wernick and the Englishman Wilfred Josephs. He also served as editor for Giuliano Bugialli's cookbook Parma: a Capital of Italian Gastronomy.

Mr Jacobson has performed as narrator in his own translation of Stravinsky's L'Histoire du soldat with members of the Philadelphia Orchestra. With the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra (conducted by Edo de Waart) and Radio Chamber Orchestra (conducted by Ingo Metzmacher) he has narrated works by Theo Loevendie and Virgil Thomson in the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, and the Cologne Philharmonie. His linking narration for Mendelssohn's Antigone was given its first performance by Claire Bloom at the 1991 Bard Festival; he subsequently performed it himself with the San Jose Symphony in California, where he returned to narrate Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex during the 1997-1998 season. He has recorded the role of Noah in Stravinsky's The Flood under Oliver Knussen's direction for Deutsche Grammophon, repeating it in his 1996 debut at the BBC Promenade Concerts in London, and is the speaker in the Nonesuch recording of Schoenberg's Ode to Napoleon, a work he also performed at Almeida Opera in London in 1992, with Klangforum Wien at the 1995 Vienna Festival; and with Ignat Solzhenitsyn and the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia in 2003. In April 2008 he will narrate Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra with the Bremerton Symphony Orchestra.