Matthew Gurewitsch
Matthew Gurewitsch
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Biography

Matthew Gurewitsch is an internationally oriented cultural commentator. In 2011, he took up full-time residence on the Hawaiian island of Maui after three decades in Manhattan. He serves as specialist in classical music at AIR MAIL (airmail.news), the online weekly launched by Graydon Carter, longtime editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, in July 2019.

Matthew's interests range broadly through the performing and fine arts. A senior editor of Connoisseur magazine in the 1980s, he has worked as an independent journalist since the early 1990s, contributing regularly to such leading publications as The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, and Smithsonian, among many others. His principal outlet has been The New York Times, for which he has covered classical music with an emphasis on opera and song, pop music, theater, Old Masters, living artists, dance, circus, and film. A generalist by conviction, he has also written on architecture, archaeology, sports, travel, and the business of culture. His views on controversial cultural subjects have been cited widely, both by scholars who regard him as a voice of authority and those his positions have provoked.

As a lecturer, interviewer, and moderator, Matthew has appeared at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, at major festivals in Italy and Switzerland, as well as in Honolulu. His sold-out talk series with master conductors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was taped for subsequent broadcast on WNYC radio. As an arts commentator, he has been heard on NPR's award-winning All Things Considered, WQXR in New York, and Hawaii Public Radio. In May 2019, he conducted live interviews with the director Peter Sellars and the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard at the Herrenhausen KunstFestSpiele in Hannover, Germany; he will be returning in 2020 for a series of five artist interviews in two weeks.

His privately published novel When Stars Blow Out: A Fable of Fame in Our Time received high praise from major figures in culture and the arts. Between hard covers, he has written lead essays for collections of paintings by the Polish-American surrealist Rafal Olbinski, a history of the tenure of Riccardo Muti as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and two volumes documenting the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, with close-up portraits of such cultural icons as David Hockney, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Julie Taymor. In 1999, he made his debut as a stage director with Wagner's romantic opera Lohengrin at the Maryinsky Theater, St. Petersburg, at the invitation of general director and principal conductor Valery Gergiev.

Since moving to Hawaii, Matthew has written and produced for the Maui Fringe Theater Festival a microscopic double bill consisting of the one-act Celestial Mechanics, for 3 human beings and one solar system, preceded by the curtain raiser An Angel Unawares, for two voices, one of them silent. He is currently at work on longer-form dramatic projects based on the personal and family archives of immigrants to the United States in the years either side of World War II.

Born in Schenectady, New York, Matthew grew up in Zurich, Switzerland. He holds a B.A. in English from the State University of New York, Stony Brook, a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard, and an M.B.A. from the Yale School of Management.

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