Let’s consider three very important conductors of the war years – Richard Strauss, Herbert von Karajan and Wilhelm Furtwängler.  They all conducted before Hitler and his ghoulish leadership team, that’s not in doubt.  Yet if we consider their very different...

Renée Fleming, Opera Ambassador to the World of SportRenée Flemingdid a top-notch job of singing our national anthem at the Super Bowl last night, don’t you think? She is a heck of a singer.In case you missed it, here it is . . . Today, the day after, tweets are...

Harmonic rhythm is the rate at which the underlying harmonic chords change in a piece of music. If you’re listening to a piece and the chords change at the rate of once a measure (from the tonic [I] to the dominant [V], or whatever), that piece has a faster harmonic...

On December 10th, I wrote that Alan Gilbert is the finest Music Director that the New York Philharmonic has had during the last five decades.That statement – that he is the finest – logically demands that I comment about the Music Directors who preceded him. So here I...

I was listening to a classical radio station last week and found one of them again – a pretentious, affected, stuffy announcer who made classical music sound alienating and unattractive. It made me think that if I were a young person just discovering classical music...

Looking back, I find that I have attended concerts conducted by the New York Philharmonic’s last six Music Directors. (Gulp, I must be a geezer.)Even though I only saw a small percentage of the total conducting output of each of these men (hope there’ll be a woman at...