Recently by Nancy Malitz

Those who love Bach are always looking to win him new followers.Glenn Gould's "Goldberg Variations"  has been my gift of choice when people ask. I now pair it with a recent DVD film by Michael Lawrence called "Bach & Friends," which captures the insights of a novel cross-section of Bach interpreters. 

The participants in this project include an A-list of musicians who extend well beyond classical music's usual suspects. We have -- in addition to composer Philip Glass, pianist Simone Dinnerstein and violinist Joshua Bell -- top artists of the banjo, mandolin and glass harp (with its water-filled crystal goblets). That's ukulele player Jake Shimabukuro, at right. We also hear from other brilliant people who specialize in computer infrastructure, video game design, brain chemistry and fractal theory. Bach lovers all.

The DVD project was a labor of love for film-maker Michael Lawrence, a classical guitarist and composer by training, with a healthy quotient of bluegrass and jazz in his mix. Lawrence's career veered early into the world of documentary film-making, where he composed film scores and mastered the other aspects of the trade. Now in his 60s, Lawrence has taken the path back around to the subject of music. Rightly determining that most Bach documentaries are dreadful, he decided to have a go at a Bach film himself.

You can't beat this DVD set if you're seeking a way into Bach's music. Assembled in Lawrence's Baltimore production studio, a former bedroom, on a shoestring budget, it was envisioned from the beginning to be accessible to the general audience. All manner of musicians volunteered their time. I instantly took to the cherub-faced organist Felix Hell, a sizzling virtuoso with feet as fleet as Savion Glover's, as he tore through the Fugue in D major (BWV 532) on a tidy three-manual Holtkamp. Here's an excerpt that the film-maker posted on YouTube, including some great interview footage that didn't make the film's final cut:

I was struck as well by the the boundary-crossing banjo player Béla Fleck who, after lingering over the Presto from Bach's Violin Sonata No. 1, confessed that this composer's music is "the way we all wish we improvised."  These players generally speak without the customary academic inflection, and the connections they make may come as a revelation to classical musicians, such as these remarks by Fleck on Bach and the legendary jazz saxophonist John Coltrane:

Lawrence said he couldn't believe his luck at first. "I'd started making cold calls to the best people I could think of and one after another said yes," he told me by telephone. "Why were they doing this?" Continue ...

I've been working on a spreadsheet to track wage patterns in U.S. orchestras, mainly to find a context for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra's headline-grabbing news as its Sunday night contract deadline looms. The highest offer on the table, from the Detroit musicians themselves, puts their 2010-11 salary at $22,650 less than they made in 2009-10. That's a cut of 22 percent. The lowest offer, from management, drops salary by $34,450, a cut of 33 percent in this automobile manufacturing capital blasted by international economic trends.

The Detroit orchestra's downturn, combined with recent salary concessions at most orchestras in response to the Great Recession, might suggest the possibility of a historic decline for orchestras generally. 

Shakespeare's Katherina of Padua is outrageous, hostile and terribly funny, and "The Taming of the Shrew" is a great game of wits as long as the game seems fair. But there's the rub for modern audiences. Never mind that the shrew was a stock character with a stock remedy. You can feel the squirming begin as Kate is systematically humiliated, muddied, starved and sleep-deprived.

Faced with the prospect of half an audience pleading, "Say it ain't so!" as Kate kneels for peace, her hand below her husband's foot, what's a producer to do?

Chicago Shakespeare Theatre has tried something new with Neil LaBute, a playwright who knows a thing or two about sexual politics in the modern era.

Once more there is a conversation in the NYtimes.com ArtsBeat blog between critics of different disciplines, in this case Charles Isherwood and Alastair Macaulay, on the subject of the Broadway dance musical "Come Fly Away," choreographed by Twyla Tharp to music of Frank Sinatra. I have been lapping it up.

Isherwood has called "Come Fly Away" a "major new work" of theater, and Macaulay has decried its dance as "intimacy perverted into exhibitionism." I am interested in the discussion that is developing over the nature of Tharp's work, for what it is and what it isn't, breakthrough or compromise, as judged from the perspective of these critics who write about related but different genres. Here's the link to the conversation, best read from the bottom up.

For the record, I saw "Come Fly Away" in one of its last previews. I found it exhilarating, and I would have been happy to tell you why over a bottle of wine after the show. But because I was a