These days, when you hear news reports about the daunting challenges facing the arts and culture world, it’s typically problems of the financial sort being discussed. For the Syrian clarinetist Kinan Azmeh, who plays Middle Eastern music with his Kinan Azmeh Quartet tonight at St. Peter’s Church, it’s just one of many challenges he faces. [...]

Earlier this December, I took the number 1 subway up to 125th Street to catch a daytime performance by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s at the Apollo Theater http://www.apollotheater.org/ for schoolchildren. The program, “What is American Music? NYC: The Great Migration and Ellis Island,” focused on twentieth-century migration to the United states, through the music [...]

In April, Esquire magazine did a photo spread called “Symphony in Black,” profiling some on-the-rise musicians on today’s classical scene. All were young, talented, hip. One musician I was surprised to see didn’t make it into that piece is José Franch-Ballester, a 27-year-old clarinet whiz who is a native of Moncofa, Spain. New Yorkers take [...]