This week our Check Ahead is something you can read! Get a glimpse into the new book from Jonathan Cott, called Dinner With Lenny: The Last Long Interview With Leonard Bernstein. It's a frank, passionate, and at times salty conversation with the late composer, conductor and educator.

Dave Brubeck, who died Wednesday at age 91, wrote large-scale symphonic and choral works that expanded music's possibilities.

From Leonard Bernstein's navy musical to Reich's evocation of downtown bustle, here are five great works New York composers have written about the Big Apple.

The best conductors and critics have a great deal to teach us, writes Fred Plotkin, whether we are performers or lovers of opera and classical music.

New York City Opera opens its fall season with the New York premiere of A Quiet Place, Leonard Bernstein's opera about an estranged family that is reunited after the death of the mother in a car crash. While reception was decidedly mixed at its Houston premiere in 1983, director Christopher Alden believes the time has come to give the opera a fresh hearing.

Leonard Bernstein was a man of supreme charisma and fantastic talent. A conductor, composer and educator, Bernstein was an undying advocate for composers, new works, new ideas, and the concept of music as a living art in the modern world. For all of these reasons, Bernstein seems a sort of spiritual antecedent to Q2.

With the return of AMC's hit television show, Mad Men, references to the 1960's seem to be everywhere. Here are the Top 5 @ 105 classical music events that would have been taking place around Don Draper starting in the fall of 1964.

Celebrating the Music of Gay and Lesbian Composers

Sunday June 28, 2009 marks the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots around Greenwich Village's Stonewall Inn, the night that galvanized the Gay Rights Movement. To mark the occasion, Evening Music celebrates the significant contributions by gay and lesbian composers to ...

In the 1950’s and 60’s, Leonard Bernstein introduced thousands of kids to classical music with his innovative and entertaining Young People’s concerts. In the 1970’s, Bernstein passed the Young People’s baton to his protégé, Michael Tilson Thomas. Today, Tilson Thomas leads the San Francisco Symphony, where he often performs children’s ...