From the Publisher

By Elizabeth Valk Long

For his colleagues, the sight of Michael Walsh striding down the corridors of TIME's New York City offices can mean one of two things. Either there's a major new production imminent at the Metropolitan Opera. Or it's dealmaking time in his baseball Rotisserie league. Walsh, TIME's classical-music critic and author of this week's story on American orchestras, has been based in Munich, Germany, since 1989. But he keeps alive an impressive array of cross- cultural interests. Besides traveling the Continent to cover cultural matters for TIME International, Michael is finishing a book on the Nazi era; is midway through his first novel, an international thriller; and, during the baseball season, checks his computer every morning for the American League box scores, all for the stat league he has been part of since 1982.

Michael spends nearly a third of his time on this side of the Atlantic as well, keeping abreast of the U.S. musical scene. He finds the dual citizenship stimulating. "What I want to do is bring to our musical coverage the European perspective that culture is a part of life, not just something one buys a ticket to." Living in Europe has made Walsh more appreciative of the high standards of music performance in his home country. This week's story reflects his opinion that American orchestras are the best in the world and his confidence that they can survive the recessionary hard times. "There is nothing wrong with U.S. orchestras that a few managers with vision and a few conductors with innovative repertories couldn't fix," he says.

A military brat born on the Marine Corps base at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, Michael did not discover classical music until age 15. He taught himself orchestration, studying Beethoven string quartets that he checked out from the library, and attended the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. Walsh was classical-music critic for the San Francisco Examiner before joining TIME in 1981. His passionate, sharply reasoned reviews have been informed by his eclectic musical tastes, which range from '60s rock to Broadway melodist Andrew Lloyd Webber, about whom he wrote a 1988 TIME cover story as well as a book, Andrew Lloyd Webber: His Life & Works (Abrams). "Classical music suffers from an image of snobbism," says Walsh. "I've always tried to make it approachable -- to present it to the reader, not as a rarefied art form but as something everybody can participate in."