On a recent night, salsa music filled the five-story building as the center's directors staged a sampling of skits, dance and poetry recitals to an audience of lawyers whose firm has agreed to represent them free.
Sessions can last from one to two hours ("depending on how long they keep you talking afterwards", says Derbyshire), and range from slightly more formal operatic recitals to sing-a-longs, music quizzes and percussion workshops.
Yet Ms. McNair deserves credit for devoting half of her Carnegie Hall debut recital to a new work by a living American.
Songs by Yrjö Kilpinen – which have genuine charm and at best a timeless balladic quality – brought the recital to a close, done with great poise and quiet, deeply affecting tenderness.
Since the hall opened in February, I've heard a broad sampling of classical music in its three stage configurations — everything from a solo piano recital to an orchestra of more than 80 players; from delicate medieval instruments to 21st-century electronics, and repertory from settled standards to avant-garde scores with film.
It is perhaps a manifestation of the same phenomenon that the pianist Daniel Steibelt (1765 1823) often played recitals to the accompaniment of a tambourine played by his wife.
That sense of total involvement was the most affecting quality of the recital the American pianist Jeffrey Swann gave on Thursday night at Bargemusic in Brooklyn, the first of eight recitals devoted to a complete survey of the Beethoven sonatas.
On the day of the attack it was hosting an additional 600 visitors on Wednesday for a poetry recital to remember Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a popular ethnic Pashtun independence activist and leader after whom the university was named.
On one occasion in London, when asked by the soprano Maria Malibran after a recital to extemporise, he created a piece which included the melodies of all the songs she had sung.
But never for one moment did the performance convey the sense of why he rates the piece so highly as to give over half a recital to it, or communicate why an audience today should devote time to it either.
