Fifty Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, presented by Geoffrey Lehmann in conversation with Edwin Frank, at Community Bookstore, Brooklyn (October 29): Rainer Maria Rilke does not suffer from a dearth of translation into English: there are no fewer than two dozen English renditions of his Duino Elegies alone. The most recent translation of the man whom W. H. Auden called “the Santa Claus of loneliness,” by the Australian poet Geoffrey Lehmann, comprises fifty poems from Rilke’s New Poems and was published earlier this month by New York Review Books. This Wednesday, Lehmann and the editorial director of NYRB, Edwin Frank, will present this new translation of Rilke’s much-beloved ekphrastic Dinggedichte (thing-poems) at Community Bookstore in Brooklyn. —AG
Conservation Center Open House 2025, at the Institute of Fine Arts (November 3): On the evening of November 3, the Institute of Fine Arts will pull back the curtain on one of the least understood aspects of the art world: conservation. Self-guided tours of the IFA’s lab will give visitors a chance to see treasures in various states of repair, including a sixteenth-century Italian painting on panel by Giampietrino, a medieval manuscript leaf with an illuminated initial, and an ancient earthenware vessel, among others. And the appeal is not just in the objects: while the IFA’s main campus, housed in the Horace Trumbauer–designed James B. Duke House at the corner of Seventy-eighth Street and Fifth Avenue, is widely appreciated, the Andrew J. Miller House just across the street, where the Conservation Center is located, is itself an unheralded architectural masterpiece, designed by Harry Allan Jacobs in 1918. —BR
Philharmonia Orchestra at Carnegie Hall (October 29): No one could take flight with Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony like Herbert von Karajan, who championed the Finn’s music when his stock was low. His 1960 recording with the Philharmonia Orchestra is justifiably legendary, recorded in the expansive acoustics of London’s Kingsway Hall, an evangelical preaching palace. Wednesday’s concert at Carnegie Hall is one of my top picks for the fall season: Santtu-Matias Rouvali will lead the Philharmonia in Sibelius’s Fifth, paying tribute to the eightieth anniversary of the orchestra and tipping a hat to Karajan’s great recording. That is not to mention the rest of the program, which will feature Víkingur Ólafsson in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5, “Emperor,” and the New York premiere of a new piece by Gabriela Ortiz. (The Philharmonia performs on Tuesday night as well.) —IS
Kirktober 2025: James Panero and Adam Simon on the Haunted House, on Zoom (October 28): Just in time for Halloween, this Tuesday, at 6 p.m. ET, I will join the screenwriter Adam Simon and Luke C. Sheahan, the editor of The University Bookman, for an online discussion inspired by the ghostly fiction of Russell Kirk. Our focus this year in what has become an annual series will be the haunted house as a motif in gothic horror. We will pay special consideration to Kirk’s Old House of Fear (with the latest edition out from Criterion Books) and his short stories as collected in Ancestral Shadows. We will also turn to other masters of the genre, from Horace Walpole and Edgar Allan Poe to Ralph Adams Cram and Shirley Jackson. The Zoom is open to the public; whether a specter haunts the online waiting room remains to be seen. —JP
Adam Kirsch on The Z Word, in conversation with Rabbi David Ingber, hosted by the 92nd Street Y (October 28): In his timely monograph The Z Word: Reclaiming Zionism, published in the May 2025 edition of The Jewish Quarterly, Poetry Editor Adam Kirsch notes how “Anti-Zionists, at least the shrewder among them . . . make a point of insisting that hostility to Zionists is not the same as hostility to Jews.” Recalling the old Nazi injunction Juden raus (Jews get out), the essay asks: “Does it make a difference to say ‘Zionists get out’ instead?” This Tuesday, October 28, Kirsch will be joined by Rabbi David Ingber to pick up that question, hosted on live stream by the 92nd Street Y. —RE
Podcasts:
“Music for a While #107: Songs of the heart, etc.” Jay Nordlinger, music critic of The New Criterion, talks music—but, more important, plays music.
By the Editors:
“How Winston Churchill’s work impacted six monarchs: ‘Advised a whole dynasty’”
James Panero, New York Post
From the Archives:
“Haphazard spirits,” by Ben Downing (June 2006). On The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, by John Gross.
