Canter Bridge

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Public radio, that soft target of pundits and ideologues, will be written up by cultural historians as one of the small candles of sanity that under the rhetorical swagger lent its soft glow to the quiet and the commuter.

How fitting, then, that this superbly accessible encyclopedia of classical music should bear the ‘NPR’ name (for ‘National Public Radio’) in its title. The ‘Recommended Recordings’ box that follows many of the entires will be hotly debated and even derided as falsely canonical. But pragmatic and novice listeners will welcome this feature as a point of departure from those awestruck moments of overwhelming beauty when one knows he must have that piece that just played, or perish.

My copy came unexpectedly from WCPE, the fine listener-supported station in North Carolina that I stream through my computer on five continents of business travel destinations, a little bit of almost-home that works its magic on the anonymity and sameness of hotel rooms. You may, less fortunate, have to buy your own.

Don’t hesitate to do so if you find yourself often accompanied by the immortal—one hopes that turns out to be the right word—sounds of the West’s still-living ‘classical’ music tradition. At least some of the angels, after all, must certainly sing Mozart. Listen to him there, read about him here, and you may one morning find yourself singing – every so slightly more knowledgeably – with them.