Caine is gently heart-breaking as the former maestro, bringing quiet gravitas to a role that he wears like an old overcoat, wrestling with the loss of memory and passion while playfully scorning levitating monks.
Perhaps the most penetrating piece, however, was by cellist and former Maestro judge Zoë Martlew.
Then, on Thursday, my meter sputtered as Alan Greenspan, former "Maestro" of the Federal Reserve, testified before the same Congressional questioners.
Such is the challenge issued by Claudio Monteverdi, the former maestro di cappella at the Basilica di San Marco, in Venice, who, four hundred and fifty years after his birth, still has a knack for putting butts in seats.
So an equally important participant in this oddly assembled but ultimately lovable enterprise is the New York Philharmonic, making one of its rare forays into the Broadway songbook under the nimble baton of Rob Fisher, former maestro of the Encores! series at City Center.
But orchestra officials also say that Mr. Levine, as a former protégé of the legendary maestro George Szell, has a keen sense of historical lineage.
Early on, he was sought out as an accompanist by headliners such as the vocalist Amir Khan (himself a former sarangiya) and played sarangi to the later vocal maestro Pandit Jasraj's tabla.
Guilet, a former concertmaster of Arturo Toscanini's NBC Symphony Orchestra, applied that maestro's exacting standards to chamber music, first in the Guilet String Quartet and then in the Beaux Arts.
For the opening exhibition at a temporary space near Times Square last year, Thu Tran, the inimitable maestro of the IFC show "Food Party," turned a former storefront into a veritable zoo of brightly-colored furniture and cabinets.
