I’ve been watching the San Francisco Symphony’s Carnegie Hall opening-night celebration of Leonard Bernstein’s 90th birthday year on Great Performances. Fittingly, there’s a little bit of everything Lenny here, early and late, Broadway, symphonic, dance, opera, song cycle—symphonic dances from West Side Story, “What a Movie” from Trouble in Tahiti (with Dawn Upshaw), “I Can [...]

It’s October, the presidential campaigns have been going on what seems like forever, the stock market’s still in some sort of atrial fibrillation, and the banks are possibly in worse shape than we had thought even two weeks ago. I’ve had enough. So as a public service, I would like to nominate David Daniels for [...]

Composer David Lang, one of the co-founders of New York’s Bang on a Can, has been a prolific presence on the city’s contemporary music scene for more than twenty years. But even he admits that it came as something of a surprise when he was announced as the recipient of this year’s Pulitzer Prize in [...]