The New Yorker writer reclaims the role of the music critic

As in The Rest Is Noise, his vast bird’s eye view of modern music, he shows himself to be the most elegant and engaging of writers. The first essay in this collection, mostly drawn from The New Yorker, starts with him saying he hates classical music – “not the thing but the name” – which, he asserts, traps a tenaciously living art in a theme park of the past and rules out the possibility that music in the spirit of Beethoven can still be created today.