A protégé of Leonard Bernstein and an eminent conductor who has toured and recorded all over the world, John Mauceri helps us to reap the joys and pleasures that classical music has to offer. Tracing musical culture back to ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, Mauceri also examines the music itself, helping us understand what it is we hear when we listen to classical music. Functioning as a kind of sonic metaphor, music expresses the deepest recesses of human feeling and emotion, and as Mauceri suggests, each piece bears the traces of its history, while the concert experience—a unique one each and every time—allows us to discover music anew.