Words and Music

From the Food Vault: The expected life of a restaurant is, sadly, brief. Unless it’s a chain with endless advertising money behind it, able...

From the Classical Vault Dept. : Eight years ago, the avant-garde quartet Brooklyn Rider snuck into Schenectady to inflict its adventurous p...

Guest Blogger Dept. : There’s no question in my mind that Henry Livingston wrote “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” the poem we incorrectly title...

I FINALLY GOT AROUND to digitizing those remaining records that seemed worth having and which lacked affordable (or any) CD replacement. Not...

“WEST SIDE STORY” SHOWS ITS AGE in many ways. Language that seemed hip 60 years ago has been replaced by terms even more evanescent. What se...

AS THE POLITICAL FUTURE of the United States grows bleaker – with its corresponding drag on the future of everyone everywhere – it’s more im...

ROSSINI’S “THE BARBER OF SEVILLE” is so iconic that you can’t help but collect recordings of it, and I’m most interested in hearing how Figa...

OPERA SARATOGA ISN’T AFRAID of making statements. In 2015, Jeremy Howard Beck’s “The Long Walk” told the true story of Iraq veteran Brian Ca...

ALTHOUGH RUDOLF TESNOHLÍDEK’S NOVEL about a resourceful, willful fox was presented as a comedy when serialized (with drawings) in 1920, comp...

Guest Blogger Dept. : As the 20th century began, Mark Twain suffered the deaths of his daughter and his wife, and seemed to owe money to eve...

BY THE TIME Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” was released, we were but one year shy of Neil Armstrong’s moon walk. Even as Cold War...

WHAT “THE MERRY WIDOW” DEMANDS, first and foremost, is a hushed, haunting “Vilia” at the top of Act Two, in which the titular widow evokes t...

Glen, NY, 23 May 2008 Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Guest Blogger Dept .: Another poem by Wodehouse, you cry? My pleasure. The English writer P.G. Wodehouse not only was a master of light vers...

From the Food Vault Dept. : How much do restaurant review matter? At one time, they were on the order of sacred pronouncements issuing from ...

SPRING – PLANTING SEASON – isn’t a good time to read David R. Montgomery’s Growing a Revolution. Not when you live, as I do, in farming cou...

JUST WHEN YOU THINK you’ve heard everything, the slow movement of Beethoven’s Seventh starts to sound in a chamber-ensemble arrangement, and...

Guest Blogger Dept. : We’re revisiting To Think of Tea! by Agnes Repplier, one of America’s finest essayists. As I wrote earlier , her keen...

IMMERSIVE THEATER has become the rage, which angers a theater-going friend. “I go to plays to be entertained,” he grouses. “Why can’t they d...

MY INTEREST IN MOVIES as an art form was sparked by a TV viewing of “The Maltese Falcon” one afternoon. Although the film was cut to fit a n...