Words and Music

POOR TOM RAKEWELL! He’s a lazy fellow looking for easy money, trying to hang onto his fiancée Anne Trulove even as her father disparages his...

YOU’RE SAVVY ENOUGH to wish to dine responsibly. You visit farmers’ markets in season; perhaps you cultivate a vegetable plant or two. You’v...

PUBLISHED IN 1984, the novel The House on Mango Street became a best-seller for author Sandra Cisneros, selling over six million copies and ...

THE 1985 PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING MUSICAL “Sunday in the Park with George” makes its Glimmerglass Festival debut in a handsome, enthusiastic, ...

JEALOUSY AND DESIRE: Two emotions that provoke nearly all the pain we suffer and the pain we inflict. Each is a confluence of component emot...

MANY OF THE SONGS we choose to sing spring to our lips because they’ve been drilled into our brains by corporate profit-fueled repetition, c...

Happy Independence Day. As we continue to move through the most fraught, dangerous era in American history, let me offer some advice culled ...

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 ...