There is one thing I really love and admire about Sarah Fishko's work -- her capacity to be at once engaged with and yet detached from her material. This interview with Ned Rorem is an extraordinarily apt example of this: Just as Rorem defines his own visions of "red" and "blue" (read German and French), Fishko lets the listener experience Ned Rorem's charm while staying true as a compass point to -- forgive me -- the necessity of art.

And as we learn in the course of this hour, Ned Rorem is a galvanizing thinker about how, and where, and why we choose art to express ourselves.

I hope that PDs with classical music programming in their charge will find an hour for this. It's worth more than that, of course, but so much of what we hear on the classical air is Dawn of the Dead material, it's a wonder there's anyone living actually doing anything. Fishko's Rorem interview is a terrific reminder that this music matters every bit as much as a dope slap from Click and Clack.