Conducting an orchestra may be the most mysterious profession. All successful maestros must have an acute ear for musical sound, a mastery of the score that finds underlying order among dizzying combinations of notes, and an ability to harness 100 players and lead them toward a common goal. But nobody, as Norman Lebrecht writes in Read More
The Lemon Table, by Julian Barnes. Alfred A. Knopf, 241 pages, $22.95.
“Novelists either go in for padding or else philosophizing, what we were told to regard as ‘generalizations,’chez Balzac.” These are the words of an 81-year-old deafspinsternamed Sylvia Winstanley, a recent resident of an “Old Folkery,” as she calls her rest home. Winstanley’s Read More
It’s about 27 miles and a felony conviction between Turkey Hill Road in Westport, Conn., and the Federal Corrections Institution in Danbury, where Martha Stewart is likely to serve her time in prison, should she fail in her promised appeal.
By law, federal inmates are granted four hours of visiting time per month. The length Read More
The Guardians of the Correct Way to Play Schubert were out in force the other night at Lang Lang’s recital in Carnegie Hall. Sitting in their midst, halfway back on the auditorium’s main floor, I could almost hear their inward grumblings of disapproval as the extravagantly hyped, 21-year-old Chinese Wunderkind hurtled through the Wanderer Fantasy Read More
For those of us who had the good fortune to grow up with classical music around the house-a not so unusual state of affairs before the disastrous schism between popular and “art” music occurred-attending a concert or opera is always, in some sense, a return to childhood. Hearing Murray Perahia in Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words Read More
