"Perhaps the chief requirement of [the conductor] is that he be humble before the composer; that he never interpose hi…"

"Today, he uses music as an accompaniment to his conducting."

"The 20th century has been a badly written drama, from the beginning. The opposite of a Greek drama. Act one: Greed an…"

"It was hard not to pay attention to Lenny, who made sure that was always the case by always being fascinating."

"A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infi…"

"The Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It's a string of separate paragraphs stuck together — with a thin paste of …"

"Any great work of art … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it…"

"The trouble with you and me, Ned, is that we want everyone in the world to personally love us, and of course that's i…"

"To Bach, notes were not just sounds but the very stuff of creation."

"Callas? She was pure electricity."