“How would you compare Mahler and Toscanini in New York?” asked Kenneth Woods, Artistic Director of Boulder’s Colorado MahlerFest, in a...

My NPR “More than Music” program “Shostakovich in South Dakota” can now be accessed here. I document the impact of a remarkable...

The Creekside Singers performing with the South Dakota Symphony “There’s just a tremendous amount of caution, a tremendous amount of...

The National Endowment for the Humanities today announced a $400,000 grant to resume “Music Unwound,” a national consortium of orchestras...

In recent weeks I’ve had occasion to perform Harry Burleigh’s “Lovely Dark and Lonely One” with three singers: Emery Stephens at St....

“Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music” is the topic of an April 12 concert/lecture at Princeton University. I’ll...

One of Gustav Mahler’s most powerful New York experiences was a funeral procession he watched from a hotel window. A fireman had drowned...

Leningrad under Nazi siege, 1941-42 There was a time – the 1990s, when I was running the Brooklyn Philharmonic at BAM – when the practice...

Norman Lebrecht has picked up my blog on Bruckner and the Cellphone and posted it on Slippedisc. You will find a torrent of responses....

Last Sunday’s performance of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony by Christian Thielemann and the Vienna Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall was very...

My forthcoming Mahler novel is now available for pre-order with a 20 per cent discount. Related events: April 4: “Mahler in New York.” A...

I’m in Sioux Falls, where the South Dakota Symphony – to my knowledge, the most genuinely innovative American orchestra – is performing...

To close my recent National Public Radio documentary “The Gershwin Moment,” I pose the following hypothetical: What if George Gershwin, a...

Michael Morgan 1957-2021 The death of Michael Morgan, last August 20, was a heartbreaking loss to American music. As music director of...

Harry Burleigh, who turned spirituals into concert songs sung by Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson, wrote in 1917 that “the voice is not...

My first novel, The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York, will be published in April 2023 by Blackwater Press (a young and enterprising...

I am of course grateful for the torrent of comments I have received in response to my previous blog about Klaus Makela conducting...

I admit that I am a jaded listener, burdened by a long and presumptuous memory. I heard Mravinsky’s Leningrad Philharmonic during their...

While the present-day conflation of the arts with instruments for social justice is dangerously overdrawn, some musical experiences are...

The recent Alexander Toradze Memorial Concert, featuring more than a dozen pianists, is now accessible online here. In addition to a lot...