Words and Music

From the Theater Vault Dept.: Looking over last week’s story, I noted that the adjacent piece in my files reveals some of the Albany area’s ...

From the Opera Vault Dept. : Paulette Haupt made her conducting debut at the Lake George Opera in 1973, with “The Barber of Seville, and lik...

Guest Blogger Dept .: Which I ought to rename Robert Benchley Dept., because I have featured Benchley essays more often than those by any ot...

From the Food Vault Dept .: I missed Mother’s Day again this year. My own mom is long-gone, but I’m married to a mom. She, however, put in s...

From the Vault Dept .: Again asking myself what I was doing forty years, I discovered that, beyond not truly wishing to know, I’d been to tw...

THE STANDARD BIOGRAPHICAL APPROACH in which the subject is born, did remarkable things, then died gets upended by Jack Chambers’s new Duke E...

SUCH AN ENTICING OFFER! Subject the reader (that’s you) to an ad or two and you’ll start raking in the earnings in no time. Online revenue w...

HALFWAY THROUGH CD 3, which is given over to the protean Mel Powell, comes his Sonatina for Piano, nestled between the likes of “You’re Luck...

THE CENTERPIECE of this 15-CD set is an appealing Beethoven symphonies cycle spread across seven CDs to replicate the initial LP box-set rel...

THE STORY OF ERNIE FIELDS BEGINS, as it must, with the visit from John Hammond. This was in the late 1930s, when Hammond was prowling the co...

WE’RE HEARING an increasing death-knell for big box sets, so I’m thrilled to welcome the reissue of all of the Guarneri Quartet’s RCA Red Se...

From the Food and Wine Vault Dept .: I wrote this piece in 2009, when the issue of wine in grocery stores was gaining momentum. I blog-poste...

AROUND THE TIME Louis Armstrong moved from a big band to a small-group setting in 1947, grumblings were being heard. At first, it came from ...

THREE MASSIVE BOX SETS have given us nearly 300 CDs of Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra in recordings made between 1944 ...

ONE OF THE STANZAS of “Crooked Foot Lane,” the opening track of Amy Engelhardt’s new album “Finish What,” runs Downloaded directions / How t...

From the Food Vault Dept. : Speaking of Vermont, as was the case with the last two posts, here’s a journey back some 17 years to revisit the...

USUALLY WHEN A KID RUNS OFF with the family money, it’s for a nefarious purpose. We expect the kid to come to no good, to crawl back, if he’...

DATING, AS IT DOES, FROM 1938, Brattleboro’s Latchis Hotel is the kind of small-city gem that was built to welcome big-city escapees seeking...

FROM THE OPENING MOMENTS of the first CD in this collection, Bach’s “Easter Oratorio,” you’re whisked back to a time before historically inf...

THERE’S A REJOINDER common to gigging freelance musicians, when invited to play a job for no money but with guaranteed “exposure”: “People d...