Part of the genesis of my Yo-Yo Ma feature on Sunday was my curiosity about how artists deal with the responsibilities of assuming a political role.

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In 1961, Pablo Casals played for John F. Kennedy at the White House. The concert could be seen as a symbol of the importance of the arts to the Kennedy administration, or as a gesture of honor to a great cellist.

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The famous Venezuelan musicians are growing long in the tooth – and there’s a new generation waiting in the wings
The Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra is youthful no longer – as I was saying last week in my review of their concert with Gustavo Dudamel at the Lucerne Easter festival.

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The Vienna Philharmonic, one of the oldest and most venerated orchestras in the world, has permanently appointed its first woman concertmaster.

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A master violinist spends much of his life up in the air
Christian Tetzlaff will fly more than 17,000 miles, visit three continents and cross more than a dozen time zones over the span of two weeks.

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Classical music as a tool for punishing youth ignites debate in U.K.
News that a school in Derby, Britain, was piping classical music into a special detention area set up to punish troublesome students has ignited a debate about the use of the pieces.

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Simon Rattle is coming home to Birmingham for a rare working visit — but he holds few hopes for his native land
So you think the mood in Britain is gloomy? The view from Berlin looks even more apocalyptic, it seems. “If I were not British,” says Britain’s most celebrated conductor, “I would say that this old country of ours is going through a kind of endgame.”

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The cream of British talent suggest how they would transform the traditional concert for a new audience.
It’s almost akin to a papal pronouncement. On Monday the world’s most influential classical music critic, Alex Ross, will deliver the annual Royal Philharmonic Society lecture to the assembled cognoscenti at the Wigmore Hall in London, entitled Inventing and Reinventing the Classical Concert.

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Pavarotti started the ball rolling. On the occasion of a concert he gave in 1986 to a packed crowd of 10,000 Chinese at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, the tenor expressed a single regret, that “the capital of the world’s most populous nation should be without a suitable opera theater.”

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Let’s face it: Many of us looking to sharpen our intellectual edges have already passed the age when becoming a prodigy is an option. We missed the opportunity to start clarinet lessons at 5. We lacked the discipline to practice for hours on end. We were told we couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.

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