Explore the vast range of titles available.

It was seen as one of the great psychological victories of the Cold War -- the lone, quirky American up against the Soviet empire, which placed enormous stock in its chess champions and had 35 grandmasters standing by to advise Spassky -- and it attracted world attention.

Such was the case Sunday afternoon when six members of the NSO -- concertmaster Nurit Bar-Josef, first violist Daniel Foster, first cellist David Hardy, principal flutist Toshiko Kohno, principal clarinetist Loren Kitt and the orchestra's pianist, Lambert Orkis -- joined for a program of music by Mozart, Dvorak and Arnold Schoenberg at the Terrace Theater.

Gabriela Montero's Saturday afternoon recital at the Harman Center for the Arts was remarkable in a number of ways: as the local debut of a strong, sensitive and deeply musical pianist; as the first Washington Performing Arts Society presentation in an attractive new venue; and as an opportunity to hear one of Robert Schumann's less familiar works for keyboard.

Conductor Valery Gergiev has many faults (has there ever been another opera director who so regularly allows his orchestra to drown out the singers?), but they pale in the face of his overwhelming virtue -- namely, the sheer sweep, energy, slashing vector and irresistible vitality of his musicmaking.

It is unnecessary to listen to more than a few moments of any mature work by Philip Glass, Olivier Messiaen or Brian Wilson (to name three radically dissimilar artists) to know exactly who was responsible for its creation. The \"Piano Piece No. 9\" begins with the same brutally dissonant chord repeated 156 times in an endless, calibrated fade-out, while the \"Piano Piece No. 10\" is as brilliantly virtuosic as any 19th-century finger-buster by Franz Liszt.

Fleisher made his formal debut in 1944 at Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic -- he had won the prestigious Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition of Belgium in 1952, after which he played in the leading concert halls throughout the world and was generally accepted as one of the world's best young pianists. After a long period of despondency, Fleisher realized that, as he put it, he loved music more than he loved the piano, and he found other ways to serve the art -- teaching, making occasional appearances as a guest conductor and playing works for the left hand alone (of which there are a surprising number, due to some distinguished commissions from a wealthy pianist who lost an arm in World War I).

Ivan Fischer, the National Symphony Orchestra's principal guest conductor, is an exciting new presence in Washington musical life, as he proved once again yesterday afternoon with a program of Mozart, Dvorak and Smetana at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall.

I hope it will not be taken as a slight if I compare [William Bolcom]'s score to the work of the late Gian Carlo Menotti. To be sure, the younger composer is a smarter, more versatile and infinitely less vulgar and hyper-glandular artist. But Menotti had his moments -- \"The Consul,\" with its pervasive, claustrophobic sense of impending doom; Acts 1 and 3 of \"The Saint of Bleecker Street,\" with their \"you are there\" evocation of brutal, jostling New York City; and most of \"Maria Golovin,\" which melds traditional Italianate lyricism with an idiosyncratic and surprisingly successful modernism. I still think quotations are generally a dangerous venture; the tune that the audience hummed throughout intermission was not one of Bolcom's own but rather the time-honored pop song \"Paper Doll.\" And yet Bolcom integrated this and any number of other references so well that he never relinquished artistic control. We heard \"Paper Doll\" (and \"The Star-Spangled Banner\" and \"Rule Britannia\" and . . . ) through Bolcom's aural prism, within the context of a unified and unfolding totality. This will not be an opera to all tastes. I don't much like the characters, with their \"dems,\" \"deses\" and \"doses,\" and can live without the archaic Freudianism of the play. Moreover, I have heard a few too many lyrical paeans to the wonders of Manhattan, usually from puffed-up residents, for this particular lifetime (although the aria itself, \"New York Lights,\" contains some of the score's most affecting music). All that said, \"A View From the Bridge\" is a remarkable accomplishment -- for Bolcom, for the cast, for WNO and for American opera.

There's nothing quite like \"[Potemkin]\" and it has been wildly influential. There is hardly a war documentary that does not borrow from it, and you can find direct quotations in films as disparate as Brian De Palma's \"Untouchables\" and Woody Allen's \"Love and Death.\" [Sergei Eisenstein] himself never again approached its mixture of formal purity, revolutionary ardor and wild-eyed experimentalism. No sympathy for the Soviet Union is required to marvel at the film's wonders, and the new print is revelatory.