For most of 2026, I have been ill, then convalescent; anxious, then relieved; unsettled, then calmed. I have been bereft of my oldest friend, then set down in a world that is not what it was.

Reading and thinking throughout, I have come across many interesting things. But it has been difficult to grasp them — to determine their size. I’ve asked, “Can I present this in a comment, or does it require a treatise?” but I haven’t been able to tell. So I have posted nothing here since early May.

The other night, something small but radiant happened. It was the conjunction of two pleasures. As I sat quietly and contentedly in my living room after dinner, I listened to a  concert on the radio.. Something about the concert — the Orchestra of St Luke’s, under Brad Lubman’s direction, performing an all-Mozart program at the Times Square church, St Mary the Virgin — pricked my ears even before the music began, but once the music started, with the bright first note of the “Salzburg” Symphony, K. 136, my attention was locked on to the signal. I was surprised by a fleeting sob,  shocked by the fresh authority of the strings as they played this very familiar music — usually pretty but trivial, a rococo lollipop — with an unaccustomed seriousness. They meant it, those violins, violas, cellos and basses (perhaps just one bass?) filling the church with clear but reverberant song.

After the intermission, the Orchestra played Mozart’s 21st Symphony, K. 134, a work that I had never listened to, if indeed I’d ever heard it. This time, I did listen, and half of the radiant thing that I mention was understanding something new about Mozart. It is a commonplace to downplay short-lived composer’s exceptionalism as a musical prodigy. He may have been a remarkable musician when he was a teenager, but he was no Mendelssohn, who at the same age as the Mozart of KK 134 and 136, produced that unmistakable, soaring masterpiece, the Octet for Strings. Neither of Mozart’s little symphonies could be compared to that. But, I saw, they were still very much Mozart, already the Mozart of the later masterpieces, in their preoccupation with solid but intricate inner voices. The “inner voices” are the lines, played at first by second violins and violas and then later by those instruments working together with the full array of wind instruments, that fill out the space between the melody at the top and the bass line at the bottom. Inner voices are what distinguish pleasant but disposable tunes from music that grips the mind. Some people don’t like them much, finding them “complicated” — most famously (if apocryphally) Mozart’s patron, the Emperor Joseph II (“Too many notes, Mozart!”) I can think of only one other great composer who was as interested — if to different effect — as Mozart in inner voices themselves, and that is of course J S Bach.

I owe this insight almost entirely to the happy gravity of the Orchestra of St Luke’s playing. I’m afraid I used to dismiss the ensemble as pickup band, comparing it unfavorably to the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. I won’t be doing that anymore.

The concert’s venue had been scheduled to be the Naumburg Band Shell in Central Park. St Mary the Virgin was the backup site (Tuesday’s forecast threatened a rainy evening). Terrance McKnight, host of the WQXR broadcast, described the church as “packed,” with people standing up along the side aisles and even sitting on the floor. I could tell that the audience  was enthusiastic. I did not wish I were there. Improviso concert-going is over for me.

So the other half of the radiant thing was the happiness of listening to the concert on the radio in a room that addresses my own somewhat complex sense of visual comfort. I was glad to be alive.

As to why I happened to be listening to the radio, something that, for decades, I did only very rarely, that’s another story.