NEW "The Scrimshaw Violin" premiered in New York in December, 2001. The New York Times carried a favorable review.

Also: Jonathan's recent work as a special executive assistant to the Chancellor of New York City's schools has been noted in several issues (May 2 & May 11, 2000) of the New York Times.

Excerpts from the NY Times, December 7, 2001:
An Old Violin Whose Music is Particularly Haunting, by ALLEN KOZINN

Jonathan Levi, a writer who was a founder of the literary magazine Granta, and Gil Morgenstern, a violinist, formed the Nine Circles Chamber Theatre two years ago, after they collaborated on a stage adaptation of Dante's "Inferno"...They goal is to create new musical theater works, and for their first collaboration, they have used a short story by Mr. Levi, "The Scrimshaw Violin," as the basis for a chamber opera...

Mr Levi's weirdly mystical story is about an encounter on Nantucket between Madeleine Starbuck Gordon, a convert to Judaism, and Sandy Lincoln, a rabbi who is also a forensic pathologist and was once a violinst. In his medical job, Rabbi Dr. Lincoln has a peculiar talent: when examining a corpse, he can determine its entire history by touching a bone...

Mr. Levi turned this into a singable libretto, with some humorous touches in the early moments. And Mr. [Bruce] Saylor clothed the story in an accessible and often involving score that leaned on Bach at significant moments... Much of the narative...was couched in bluesy timbres and melodic turns of jazz...The cast was compact and evenly balanced, and all in good vocal form...The accompanying ensemble...moved deftly between Mr. Saylor's operatic and jazz styles, and Mr. Morgenstern gave a nicely nuanced account of the prominent violin line.

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Excerpts from his NY Times "PUBLIC PROFILE":
A Proponent for Adding the Arts to the 3 R's, by ROBIN FINN

He's the resident intellectual for New York City's public school system, an arts dabbler who plays a mean violin, writes a lean libretto and stuffs notes for his next novel in the pocket where his handkerchief should be.

In his teens, he and his violin sneaked into jam sessions with Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee at Upper West Side coffeehouses, and he moonlighted as a jazz fusion violinist while attending Yale and later Cambridge on a Mellon Fellowship. These days the only music in Jonathan Levi's drab office at the Board of Education's Brooklyn headquarters is the sound of sirens and horn honks leaking in through his closed window. Doesn't matter.

Mr. Levi, 44, is way too busy putting the finishing touches on his next, some would say eccentric, official enlightenment project -- an unusual adult play date that requests the presence of the city's 43 school superintendents at Carnegie Hall today for a violin lesson with Isaac Stern -- to notice the cacophony outside. Or maybe it's all music to him.

"I'll bring my fiddle and Isaac Stern's bringing his," says Mr. Levi, a pale, preoccupied man with thinning hair gone askew and, this day, an owl-patterned tie (he still can't believe he's taken a job that requires tie wearing). "My kids are horrified," says this stay-at-home writer, whose most normal work project to date was directing the poet Robert Pinsky's adaption of Dante's "Inferno" for the 92nd Street Y.

Not that he directed in a normal way. When Mr. Levi, who revels in imaginative flights (let the rest of the world fly commercial) decided the "Inferno" could be viewed through the prism of the civil rights movement, he took the production to Montgomery, Ala., and staged it from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s former pulpit.

Mr. Levi charts his career path as headed nowhere in particular but everywhere in general, a sampler whose projects may be serendipitous but never half-baked (he and two fellow Cambridge students transformed Granta from a 16-page mimeographed handout to a 356-page heavyweight with bylines like Sontag, Updike, and Rushdie). So he didn't dream of saying no when his Upper West Side soulmate of sorts, Harold O. Levy, a Citigroup executive-turned-interim schools chancellor, asked him to put on a suit and tweak the collective intellect of the seven-member school board.

At the time, Mr. Levi was scribbling away on his first novel, "A Guide for the Perplexed" (Random House, 1992).

For Mr. Levi, music lessons were de rigueur, culture a homegrown phenomenon (his father is a philosophy professor at Columbia, his mother, a social worker). Ideas flew in their apartment like verbal fastballs. "The dinner table conversation was always about ideas and there was never much of an opportunity to get away with a sloppy idea," recalls Mr. Levi, whose father worries, now that he's got this serious day job, when he's going to finish his second novel. And if Mr. Levy's tenure (and his own) expires in July? It's all grist for the third novel.

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Excerpts from NY Times, May 11, 2000:
43 Superintendents Do Their Best Jack Benny
By ABBY GOODNOUGH

Isaac Stern has coached budding violin virtuosos for decades, but the students he took on yesterday were a different breed altogether: New York City's 43 school superintendents, most of whom had never touched a violin before. The lesson took place at Carnegie Hall, no less.

Harold O. Levy, the interim chancellor, had persuaded Mr. Stern to give the superintendents a lesson in hopes that they would place a higher priority on music instruction for students. The lesson was part of a broader plan to raise the level of intellectual debate among the school system's leaders and make them more culturally attuned.

Jonathan Levi, one of Mr. Levy's top aides and his cultural impresario, was on hand to make sure the lesson went semi-smoothly. Mr. Levi, an accomplished violinist, adjusted people's fingers, tucked instruments more firmly under chins and practically pulsed with delight.

"Isaac Stern has been a hero of mine since I was a little kid," said Mr. Levi, whose musical claim to fame is having taught the actress Jennifer Aniston how to play the violin when she was growing up in New York City. "If only we could get him certified, we'd have him teaching in the schools."

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