In 2009, we got used to seeing angry mobs descend on public forums with vengeance in their hearts. So for anyone who'd been to a town-hall forum on health care, the scene at Boston's Old South Church on January 5 was eerily familiar -- an older audience, larger than you'd expect (the organizers put it at 400-plus), venting its collective spleen at hapless bureaucrats.

(Photograph by Michael Lutch)

Is there a pianist in the house?

Moved and excited by pianist Leon Fleisher’s performance of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with the Boston Symphony, I wanted to hear it again. But when I returned to Symphony Hall, I learned that around 6:00 PM that evening, a stomach flu had forced Fleisher to cancel, and that the distinguished Austrian/Canadian pianist Anton Kuerti, in town to hear his son Julian (one of the BSO’s two new assistant conductors) in his BSO conducting debut, agreed to go on, without any rehearsal, in Fleisher’s place.