For twenty-plus years, music critic Bernard Holland heard it all. He reviewed and interviewed many of the most celebrated classical artists - singers, conductors, instrumentalists, composers and the avant garde - of the twentieth century for the New York Times.
Reporting both sides of the culture war between music history and radical change, Holland writes critiques on Philip Glass to Verdi, Messiaen to Bach, Peter Sellars to Zeffirelli, and Linda Ronstadt to The Three Tenors.

Throughout, Holland changes the discussion from ‘will classical music survive?’ to ‘what classical music really is’ and, in the process, destroys the myth of ‘high and low art’. He also asks what a music critic really is.

Along the way, the reader chats with Herbert von Karajan, takes a plane trip with Yo-Yo Ma, joins in with the boos at Bayreuth, and walks the slow walk with Robert Wilson.

No one today can match the limpid elegance and intellectual precision of his style, which recalls the heyday of Virgil Thomson. -The New Yorker

Perhaps the most important of this town’s arbiters. The Independent

Holland has a remarkable ability to conjure up the essence of a composer of a piece of music in a few deftly chosen words. He is, I think, an aphorist of unparalleled virtuosity. - San Francisco Chronicle