"How the classical concert took shape"

[anhinga_anhinga]

The modern classical-music performance, as audiences have come to know it and sometimes to love it, adheres to a fairly rigid format. [...]

Most people are aware that this clockwork routine-reassuringly dependable or drearily predictable, depending on whom you ask-is of recent origin, and that before 1900 concerts assumed a quite different form. It’s always a shock, though, to confront the difference in all its particulars. [...]