Words and Music

AS YOU MAKE YOUR WAY through this well-reasoned, well-researched, densely written book, you may hear the sound of a scream, a crescendo of p...

From the Classical Vault Dept .: When I visited Newell Jenkins at his Columbia County home in 1985 to learn about his upcoming concert serie...

From the Food Vault Dept .: The Tory Tavern, alas, is no more – Ralph and Irmgard Buess retired in 2013 and put the building up for sale. As...

THIS IS A PIVOTAL TIME OF YEAR for beekeepers large and small. As the weather starts to turn colder and less predictable, bees begin prepari...

From the Classical Vault Dept. : It’s always a pleasure to revisit a Musicians from Marlboro review, because it brings back so much of the w...

From the Classical Vault Dept .: George Walker, who died in 2018 at the age of 96, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer – the first Black c...

From the Vault Dept .: When Oscar Brand died in 2016, at the age of 96, he had achieved the distinction of being the single (and singular) h...

From the Classical Vault Dept. : I tend to shy away from offering my less-than-enthusiastic reviews to the blog readers who stumble across t...

From the Vault Dept .: Here’s a cookbook roundup I wrote for Albany’s Metroland Magazine seven years ago. I’m still consulting some of these...

Guest Blogger Dept. : We welcome the debut on this blog of O. Henry, pen name of the dipsomaniacal jailbird William Sydney Porter, whose sto...

A CHEF WHO WAS TEACHING ME to make bread regarded my kneading practice with dismay. I was using the opportunity to inflict imaginary violent...

FRENCH COMPOSERS HAVE CELEBRATED the flute more vividly than any others. Berlioz was a flutist himself, and never spared the instrument in h...

From the Computer Vault Dept. : I just found another piece I wrote for the magazine Yahoo! Internet Life (they lurk in old hard drives), pr...

MY TWO MOST MEMORABLE concert-going experiences both were recitals by guitarist/lutenist Julian Bream. It’s difficult to describe what made ...

From the Musical Vault Dept .: One of the most engaging artists to have emerged from the long-running Martha Argerich-hosted summer fesitval...

From the Vault Dept .: Advances aren’t nearly as interesting as reviews, but this piece looks at a theater piece with dance that presented a...

From the Food Vault Dept .: The Olde Bryan Inn in Saratoga Springs has a venerable history, which includes two review visits that I paid du...

From the Musical Vault Dept. : Monday’s post recalled a warm Saturday night when I enjoyed a program at Robert Conant’s Greenfield Center (N...

From the Music Vault Dept.: It was good and hot at the end of July 1986, and the temperature in a small studio out in the woods on a hot day...

Guest Blogger Dept. : One of the best-selling novels a century was Booth Tarkington’s Penrod , a collection of stories in the popular genre ...