Ed and I were at Tanglewood in July to hear the Boston Symphony Orchestra perform Brahm’s Symphony No. 2 in D, and pianist Eric Lu “tickle the ivories” on Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor. Next to the larghetto movement in the program, I jotted “Music heals—exquisite!”

Tanglewood is the summer home of the BSO, and though they do have indoor concerts there, every Friday, Saturday and Sunday, the orchestra and their guest artists perform in what’s known as The Shed—an open bandshell that seats close to 5,000 people beneath a canopy. The lawn that fans out from the bandshell can accommodate another 15,000 music lovers. It’s not unusual for both the seats and the lawn to be packed.

Obviously, the lawn is a weather-dependent gamble you take, but only twice in 32 years have I had to pack everything up and seek standing-room shelter under the canopy. Well worth the magic that is a night on the lawn at Tanglewood. You can rent chairs, but most people bring their own. Just add the easy-to-assemble roll-up table we purchased twenty years back, pack a cooler with salad, sandwiches, a bottle of wine (don’t forget the candle for evening performances!) and you have all the ingredients for an afternoon or evening of enchantment. And that’s BEFORE the music starts.     

Tanglewood is where I saw legendary violinist Joshua Bell perform Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major, a piece as famous for its technical challenges as for its soul-stirring beauty. And that night, Bell was on fire! He made the concerto come alive as I have never heard any recording do. The audience was with him heart and soul every note of that piece. We knew he was crushing it and he knew it, too. When the final note faded, the thousands gathered went wild, applauding and cheering for ten minutes. However technically perfect any recording is, it could never be this. A flawless synergy between performer, music, and audience.

Show Me a Story

Long—and I mean long, about 2400 years—before there were movies, there was theatre, the acting out of a story on a stage before a live audience. Theatre emerged from a combination of oral storytelling, choral singing, and dancing—all popular draws in the world of ancient Greece where the art was born. In fact, it was the Greek poet and performer Thespis who invented acting (hence the word “thespian”) in 534 BCE when he stepped out of the chorus one day and began telling the story of the song—a tragedy—as a character of this tragedy would and acting out the part of that character. Tell me a story became show me a story.

And theatre has never looked back.

In Shakespeare’s time, his plays performed in the original Globe Theatre drew something like 20,000 people each week. Today, London’s West End boasts more than three dozen theatres, and the larger London area has over 200 indy playhouses, similar to Off Broadway venues in the U.S. Speaking of the States, Midtown Manhattan is home to 41 designated Broadway theatres which, for the week ending July 12, drew 272,464 attendees for the 32 shows currently playing.

And Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, reconstructed in the 1990s within “a stone’s throw” as they say of the original Globe site, still draws the crowds. Almost thirty years after it opened its doors in 1997, The Bard’s timeless works continue to play to packed houses (including the “groundlings” who stand through 2 ½ to 3 ½ hour performances!) May through October.  

When movies first appeared, many predicted this new storytelling technology would be the death knell of theatre, but it wasn’t. Theatre works a kind of magic—a symbiotic relationship where the actors feed the audience whose reactions in turn drive the actors. In the very best theatrical performances, you feel this when the audience rises as the curtain falls and explodes in wave after wave of applause. The standing ovation. This doesn’t happen at the end of a movie. We watch a movie. A film may stir our feelings—sometimes deeply—but there’s no direct emotional interaction with the characters. The screen actors can’t hear us. There is a slight but critical distance in a film completely lacking in a theatrical performance—a performance that literally will never happen again in quite the same way.

Don’t Miss the Original. There Are No Duplicates.

The prints are lovely—a daily reminder of a work of art that spoke to something deep within us—but they can never deliver the emotional impact of viewing the original. Hence, there are paintings in The National Gallery and the Tate Britain I visit every time I’m in London. Among them The Execution of Lady Jane Grey by Paul Delaroche, achingly sad in its depiction of the teenage queen being led, blindfolded, her hands outstretched, to the chopping block, a victim in the dynastic struggle between Protestants and Catholics in Queen Mary I’s England.

Another must-see for me is Mark Gertler’s The Merry-Go-Round. Painted to show the artist’s horror at the events of World War I, I have always viewed the manic, frightening faces of the merry-go-round’s riders as a warning of the rise of fascism that would drag us into World War II, a dark and dangerous threat that has raised its murderous head yet again today.

Perhaps my favorite, though, is John William Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott. As I noted in my December 2025 post, the painting captures perfectly the profound despair we suffer when we believe all hope is truly gone.

Standing before these original masterpieces, so evocative of the human condition that transcends time and place, I always long to tell people as they whip from painting to painting, snapping a quick shot of each one, “Slow down, take in the entire composition—the colors, the brush strokes, the emotion of each work. Better to really see ten paintings than to photograph a hundred.” What are the odds they will even give those hundred photos more than a cursory glance? If they review them at all.

Books Deserve Our Full Attention  

I’m a voracious reader. The New York City Public Library has only a slight edge on my book collection. Okay, that is blatant hyperbole, but I do love books.  

When Gutenberg invented the printing press nearly 600 years ago, he opened up the world of literature, philosophy, science, history and much else to the common people. A treasure trove of knowledge and imagination lay within anyone’s reach for the price of a book. And if that price was too dear, public libraries evolved to loan the printed word for free. But, as I said in last month’s post, Americans are reading less—a lot less. Forty-four percent of American adults did not read a single book last year. And while audio book sales have not yet eclipsed print book sales (believe me, the research on this question turns up many contradictory stats—audio book sales are booming/audio books sales have dropped in the past year), one of the reasons most frequently cited for listening to books rather than reading them is multi-tasking. You can listen to a book while cooking dinner or cleaning the bathroom or walking the dog. Yes, you can listen to it, but you can’t really take it in. You can’t flip back a few pages to reread a passage in light of new developments. You can’t pause to ponder the author’s meaning or the characters’ interactions, or process complex information in the case of nonfiction.   

As it turns out, there is nothing quite like the real thing. Not a musical recording that captures the energy and soul of a live performance, or a film that reproduces the synergy between actor and audience in the theatre. Not a single art print that prompts the profound emotions a great painting stirs. Nor an audio “book” that permits the reader to plumb the author’s text.  

Nothing, Nada. They are precious. We must protect them. We must actively support them.