Sara Fishko

A three day mini-film festival, “The Music of Morricone,” begins tonight at BAM.  The superstar film-composer Ennio Morricone is noted for mixing all kinds of sounds into his scores.

How can we understand this composer's music?

Angela Hewitt will be in New York next week to give a master class in the performance of music by Bach.  As WNYC’s Sara Fishko tells us, Bach’s keyboard music has been especially appealing to pianists with a strong point of view.  Here is this Fishko Files…

Fishko Files on the rise and fall of the innovative wide-screen film format Cinerama, which, as WNYC's Sara Fishko tells us, delighted viewers and gave the post-WWII film business a much-needed jolt.

Sid Caesar, the comic genius behind some of the most memorable sketches ever created for TV, died Wednesday in Beverly Hills at age 91. WNYC’s Sara Fishko spoke to Caesar for this episode of Fishko Files in 2000.

It’s just a hundred years since Charlie Chaplin’s The Tramp first appeared on the silver screen and created a sensation. And it all started almost by accident.

Born in February 1914, he romanced Ingrid Bergman, smoked weed with Dizzie Gillespie and rose to considerable twentieth century stature playing and composing for the mouth organ – oth...

For this Fishko Files episode, WNYC’s Sara Fishko interviewed William Bolcom, the genre-mixing, music-loving, composer-quoting writer of all kinds of musical works.

This month, Ennio Morricone will receive The Recording Academy's Trustees Award. In his honor, this Fishko Files episode inspired by his iconic film scores.

WNYC's Sara Fishko traveled to New Orleans to interview pianist Henry Butler in 2005.  Since then Butler has moved to Brooklyn, and his spectacular piano-playing will be featured this week at the Jazz Standard in Manhattan.   Here's a taste of Butler for this Fishko Files podcast.

What's more powerful than coming across an old handwritten letter? As a dramatic device, it’s been fueling plots and theatrical twists since time immemorial. Sara Fishko considers the...

WNYC's Sara Fishko considers the long career of iconic conductor Arturo Toscanini in this Fishko Files (from 2007).

Critic Harris Goldsmith has known classical music from both sides –as gifted performer and insightful listener. His unusual musical life is the subject of this Fishko Files.

It's a Barbara Stanwyck moment, with a new book just out and a retrospective of her films beginning tomorrow. As WNYC’s Sara Fishko tells us in this Fishko Files, Stanwyck was part of a generation of women who really knew how to deliver a line.

This fall photographer/filmmaker Bruce Weber has been celebrating 25 years since the original release of his popular film “Let’s Get Lost.”  That film, says WNYC’s Sara Fishko, is one of many efforts to capture the “mystique” of horn players –both real and imagined (first aired in 2007).

The aftermath of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy played out over 4 days, 50 years ago, on television.  As WNYC’s Sara Fishko tells us, the national tragedy was a provin...

On this very day in November of 1943, Leonard Bernstein made a historic debut that played out like a hokey melodrama. WNYC’s Sara Fishko has more in this edition of Fishko Files…

World War II is still alive in popular culture. Its stories are told in each generation in films, documentaries, and books. In this archival episode, Sara Fishko considers our endless fascination with the most documented event in history.

Earlier this week, selections from the letters of Leonard Bernstein were released in book form for the first time. As WNYC’s Sara Fishko tells us in this edition of Fishko files, the letters are pure Lenny.