July 11, 2024 - Muppets in Moscow and Jeremy Eichler

In her book, Muppets in Moscow, Natasha Lance Rogoff pulls back the iron curtain on what it was like to work in Russia as a TV producer in the 1990’s.  There were absolute triumphs of Big Bird diplomacy,  moments when capitalism collided with the legacy of communism, and a deep realization that a country undergoing radical change, can only change so much . Then  it’s a  conversation about music as memory.Jeremy Eichler joins us to talk about his new book,  “Time’s Echo,”  which looks at how Shostakovich and other composers used classical music to not only articulate the unspeakable horrors of WWII but to also memorialize the victims of the Holocaust.