Here at Stand Partners for Life, we get a lot of questions about the future: what happens if I'm not playing concerto X by age Y? What will happen if I study with teacher Z, or go to school-- I ran out of letters!

If it seems like we've been silent the last couple of months, that's because Akiko's life has been pretty different since early March! One moment she was working out at the gym like she did five times a week,

OK, you guessed it: it's going to be impossible for us to narrow things down to one "best"! But Akiko and I give it our best shot, outlining the pluses and minuses for all the popular choices. In this episode we refer to an article I wrote a few yea...

Virtuoso Ray Chen hardly needs an introduction, but let's start with his Gold Medal at the Queen Elisabeth competition in 2009, at the age of 20! His career since then, by all appearances, has been an effortless climb. But as you're about to hear,

I met Joseph Bein almost as soon as I moved to Chicago to join the CSO in 2002. We've talked great instruments and bows ever since, over dinners, glasses of wine, and even Cubs games! Come to think of it, at Wrigley Field the talk is all baseball... ...

When it comes to getting all those notes, rhythms, dynamics, and articulations under your fingers, you've got to use every trick in the book. In this episode, we talk about how we get through our stacks of orchestra music. Of course,

A recent change of plans at the LA Phil leads us to reminisce on other times we've had conductors cancel. What happens when the audience is waiting and the show must go on? Transcript Nathan Cole: Hello,