The other day, I heard Chopin’s Nocturne in C minor, Op. 48 No. 1, performed live on a nineteenth-century Corning Steinway piano. As Igal Kesselman, the pianist, made his way through that nocturne’s melancholy, stormy, and contemplative sections, in the background a woman checked out a flouncy silver-grey dress on the racks at Ann Taylor. [...]

If you’re in a roomful of professional musicians and you want to watch the cumulative blood pressure level spike, just question the assumed wisdom that live music by professional musicians is preferable to canned music. The agita is understandable—these are people worrying about their livelihoods, after all—but the fact remains that despite the many technology [...]

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 [...]