As some readers of these posts may know, I'm part of the Air Crew for the Arts Intel Report (AIR) in Air Mail (www.airmail.news), the addictive, now two-year-old news portal founded by Graydon Carter after his phenomenal 25-year run as editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair. A lot of my work appears in the form of monthly listings that cover events all around the world--great fun to write, but too short and too numerous to post individually. Also, they're behind the paywall! (My entirely unbiased opinion is that the section, across the board!, is worth every penny.) But I also contribute "highlights" that appear on the homepage, where they are totally shareable. Here's my latest, covering a particularly fascinating topic. Click here and read on! And let me tell you, you'll love the historic photographs!

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With five minutes to spare somewhere in the mix, we turned to Elly Ameling, soprano, and Rudolf Jansen, piano, for Schubert's "Suleika I," a golden oldie, if ever there was one. Bliss.

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Our red thread on June 6 was grand masters of the keyboard doubling as leaders of the band. Starting at the top with the new set of the Brahms Piano Concertos (ECM New Series 2021) András Schiff and the conductorless Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, we heard the opening Maestoso from the Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 15. This is repertoire beyond the usual ken of the original-instruments crowd, and the performance was accordingly startling: the orchestral palette unusually tangy, even raw, the textures counterintuitively contrapuntal. The press release references Arnold Schönberg, who called Brahms "the Progressive," even as he pointed to Brahms's immersion in Beethoven and Bach. Channeling his inner Marty McFly, Schiff hurtles back to the future, stripping away the accretions of "tradition" the better to show the music's prophetic qualities. Whether or not this is how you'll prefer your Brahms henceforth, it's an adventure.

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A drumroll, please, for the 24-year-old violinist Randall Goosby, whose debut album Roots (Decca) drops on June 25. We opened our May 30 show with three tracks:

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Who knew? In 1823, believe it or not, the American consul in Vienna approached Beethoven on behalf of the eight-year-old Handel and Haydn Society, in Boston, to commission an oratorio in English. What if, rather than breathing his last in 1827, Beethoven had lived, accepted the offer, and crossed the Atlantic in 1833 to compose a late masterwork? In the novel Mr. Beethoven, Paul Griffiths offers an answer.

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