Leighton Kerner, longtime classical-music critic of The Village Voice, died on April 29 at the age of seventy-nine. He started writing for the Voice back in 1957, two years after the downtown weekly began publication, and joined the staff in 1961. In recent years, as the Voice pruned classical coverage from its pages, he wrote for Opera News and other publications. No critic I know was more assiduous in attending concerts, or more delighted by the sheer variety of music on offer around New York. His experience was vast, his outlook ever-youthful. Someone once jokingly asked him who his favorite Spice Girl was; he answered, "Lorraine Hunt Lieberson." As Robert Christgau said last year, in a comment quoted in Susan Elliott's Musical America obituary, he had "the virtue, rare in his field, of writing like a fan, always warm, never magisterial." Leighton will be missed. (More at Opera News and Kyle Gann.)
