A 1970 Buenos Aires LP of Alban Berg’s Chamber Concerto leads back to a 1954 Vienna recording session, a Hannover-born conductor Alma Mahler had trusted, and a New Year’s Eve ritual in a Greenwich Village townhouse where two record producers poured molten lead into cold water and read the shapes.

Leon Botstein had agreed to sit before our camera earlier in the year, but a sequence of inconveniences pushed our meeting past the date we had set for the avant-première at the Century. When the interview finally happened, at his residence at Bard, he gave us not an answer but an essay — on Bristow, Dvořák, the modern piano, and the long, unfinished business of figuring out what America sounds like.

You probably know Piazzolla from Adiós Nonino, or from the Kronos Quartet recording that made a generation of American listeners suddenly aware that something extraordinary had been happening in Buenos Aires for thirty years without their knowing. What is harder to explain is why it took so long — not for American audiences to discover him, but for Buenos Aires itself to accept what he had made.

The Lakota Music Project — a collaboration between the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra and Lakota and Dakota musicians that is unlike anything else in American cultural life. This is not a guest-spot model, where an indigenous artist appears on stage for a movement and then disappears.

The evening was organized around the idea of America — its founding ideals, its contradictions, its music — and it unfolded with the kind of architectural clarity that only a conductor of long experience can bring to a program. Slon has spent a quarter century building something at UVA that is difficult to name and easy to feel: a choral culture in which students sing not just with technical accomplishment but with genuine understanding of what the music means and where it co

The Augarten was not merely a picturesque garden. Established as a public park in 1775 by Emperor Joseph II, it was one of the first civic green spaces in Europe. At its entrance, an inscription still proclaims it a place “Allen Menschen gewidmeter Erlustigungs-Ort von ihrem Schätzer.” The translation is eloquent: Place of recreation dedicated to all people by their admirer.