Words and Music

Guest Blogger Dept. : I was delighted to spend time recently with Nat Benchley, grandson of the humorist whose work I revere, and to discove...

From the Classical Vault Dept .: Eleven years ago, soprano Kiri Te Kanawa bid farewell to the performing stage with a tour that stopped in S...

An appropriate-for-the-day song I co-wrote with Tom Savoy for our musical adaptation of Booth Tarkington's "Beasley's Christmas...

CHEF ANA SORTUN graduated from La Varenne in Paris, but her interest in Middle Eastern food has taken her beyond that classical French foun...

Guest Blogger Dept. : We return, as we often should, to the fables of George Ade, this one a lengthier opus limning the hazards of succumbin...

From the Holiday Vault Dept .: Christmastime is here, by golly; disapproval would be folly ... so here’s a review I wrote of a brass quintet...

PIANIST SIMONE DINNERSTEIN set the stage well before she entered. Her piano sat on a darkened stage at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre,...

THERE’S A SCENE in the 1947 movie “Carnegie Hall” in which cellist Gregor Piatigorsky performs Saint-Saëns’s “The Swan” while surrounded by ...

PREACHING PRECAUTION isn’t often the same as practicing it. The “ounce of prevention” principle, seemingly instilled in us at birth, has lon...

From the Vault Dept. : One of a series of liner notes I wrote for the sadly defunct Dorian Recordings label, although I swear my involvement...

Guest Blogger Dept .: Here’s Robert Benchley, back to set us straight about the travails of correspondence, which clearly was in a parlous s...

OUR THAI CUSINE-INSPIRED Thanksgiving dinner had a preparation of khao soi , a wonderful coconut milk-based soup, as its centerpiece. Turkey...

HOW SENTIENT ARE OUR DOMESTICATED BEASTS? How about beasts in general? We’d like to think that those creatures we take into our houses and h...

LOUDON WAINWRIGHT III AND DAVID BROMBERG are guitar-playing singer-songwriters who gained fame in the 1970s, but who, beyond that, would see...

A RECENT ISSUE of a classical-music magazine sports a letter from a reader who is aggrieved by the practice of singers to perform Baroque an...

JAMES LAPINE’S BOOK for the musical “Into the Woods” drew on the work of Bruno Bettelheim and Joseph Campbell to fashion a narrative that ca...

PICKET LINES DON’T VARY MUCH. Marchers carry signs and chant slogans, and there’s usually some speechifying and music. When the strike looks...

“LET ME SHOW YOU HOW COUNTRY FEELS,” sings Randy Houser before the lights dim for the start of “Williston,” a new play by Adam Seidel. And t...

IT IS EASILY ARGUED THAT, more than ambiance, a coffeehouse needs wifi and enough room on the table for your computer, coffee, and cellphone...

AT THE CENTER OF THE DISCOGRAPHY of conductor Charles Munch are his many recordings with the Boston Symphony, which he music-directed from 1...