Arvo Pärt is the master of implying far more than he says. At its most spare, his music seems to barely exist. And that’s probably why I’ve had such a long road to fully appreciating this internationally acclaimed composer. But on Monday night, I finally arrived — and then some.

Eden Bareket, Night (Fresh Sound New Talent)

One reporter’s account of the 2007 expansion of the Seattle Art Museum noted that the large trove of works then given and promised to SAM by multiple owners would bring an estimated $1 billion if they were to come to auction. Now some of them have.

I have a suggestion for any opera company that commissions a new opera. And I don’t mean this as a joke. Once the work starts to take shape, show it to someone at HBO. And if they say it isn’t good enough for them, pull the plug.

It’s a common concept in change management discussions and a fairly self-evident one. Still, I’ve been struck by the number of community engagement professionals leading organizational transformation to community engagement who have cited it as a critical factor in the process.

Says one administrator who’s worked in the UK, US, and Australia, “When you talk about ‘funding models’, it’s important to realise that the States effectively doesn’t have one. Referring to what happens in the US as a funding model is like calling an earthquake a lifestyle choice.”

Auctioneer Harry Dalmeny (new to me) at Sotheby’s Impressionist/Modern sale tonight had a strange way of trying to entice bidders by pelting them with barbed wisecracks

I don’t often post video of people talking. The best way to understand music is to listen — often — intensively — with concentration — without preconceptions. Today, we have a departure from the Rifftides policy of letting the music speak for itself.

Charlie Haden & Brad Mehldau, Long Ago and Far Away (Impulse!)

Sasha Waltz & Guests brings her Kreatur from Berlin to BAM.

The Wall Street Journal pays me to go see plays each week and write about them, which is my idea of a terrific way to earn a living. I have yet another reason for loving my job, though, one that might just be of even greater importance, which is that it forces me to engage each week with a brand-new set of experiences.

Philip Glass used to say he never composed opera per se, but ended up rubbing shoulders with Verdi and Wagner because opera houses had the needed theatrical apparatus. After 37 years of making the opera-house rounds, Satyagraha, is no easier to define.

Dianne Dwyer Modestini, who painstakingly restored Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, is exasperated by the questions that have been raised about the condition and attribution of the rediscovered painting that was to have been unveiled on Sept. 18 at the Louvre Abu Dhabi but has not resurfaced since it was sold at Christie’s on Nov. 15.

Ranky Tanky, whose music is grounded in the Gullah songs of the South Carolina Lowcountry, is one of those bands I had heard good things about but never seemed to catch here in NYC. But there they were at WOMEX in the Canary Islands, so I made it a point to check in on them.

There was much more to Art Carney than his much-loved impersonation of Ed Norton, the bumbling sewer worker on The Honeymooners, and the reason why you probably aren’t aware of that fact that is one of the saddest stories I know.

The book is a 20-years posthumous collection of writings from the Fluxus – and far more than Fluxus – composer, poet, printmaker, and artist.

“The listener who is fully who open to Werner’s playing is likely to also feel joy and delicious gratitude.”

How did arts institutions in LA survive the Great Recession?

Luke Syson, who in 2012 came to the Metropolitan Museum from the National Gallery, London, becoming the Met’s chairman of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts in 2014, is now poised to join the wave of high-level departures from our country’s preeminent museum.

Randy Waldman, Superheroes (BFM Jazz)
Kate McGarry, The Subject Tonight Is Love (Binxtown Records)

Many composers go from maximal to minimal as they pare back and distill their musical language; Spears may be going the opposite direction. His Requiem and the neo-medieval dance opera Wolf-in-Skins are extremely spare; the music of his hit opera Fellow Travelers is understated dramatically but more harmonically rich; The Tower and the Garden, his new 30-minute piece for choir and string quartet, is positively lush.

I get questions on this topic frequently and always have to gird myself before responding. So here is what I try to bear in mind in answering the questions.

My first reaction when the press release hit my inbox today was: “This has got to be a hoax!” Reading the first sentence of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s announcement made me even more incredulous.

Gary Giddins, Bing Crosby – Swinging On A Star: The War Years 1940-1946 (Little, Brown)
Seventeen years following his initial installment, Gary Giddins continues the story of the man who absorbed and internalized early jazz values in the 1920s and became the most important popular singer in the world.

Royston was a drummer, but the album “makes clear that not only is he a master of his instrument but it also emphasizes that his complete musicianship allowed authorship of all of the album’s dozen tunes.”

I recently sat disconsolately through a screener of director Nathaniel Kahn’s new artworld documentary, The Price of Everything. Its dyspeptic take on the art world turned my stomach

Over the years I’ve attended several musical events put on by Rachael Worby, a human dynamo who has operated several series in and around Pasadena. Worby — who was once, I think, the First Lady of West Virginia — seems interested in something both populist and unorthodox.

Annie Chen Octet, Secret Treetop (Shanghai Audio&Video Ltd)
Woody Shaw, Tokyo 1981 (Elemental Music)
Dexter Gordon Quartet, Tokyo 1975 (Elemental Music)

A look at two works, now playing in New York, set in the much-mythologized Old West: Puccini’s Girl of the Golden West at the Met and a revisionist Oklahoma! at St. Ann’s Warehouse.

Over the past year the breathless articles that used to accompany new tech innovations have dried up, replaced with dystopian concerns about the Dark Web, privacy, hacking, fake news, and the deadening and manipulative effects of social media addiction.