Leos Janacek's two quartets, the first inspired by Tolstoy's "Kreutzer Sonata" and the second by his own complex relationship with the married woman who was the muse of his old age, rank high among the masterpieces of modern classical music. This Windy City production of Alan Bennett's play about a group of English public-school prodigies and the teacher (Donald Brearley) who loves certain of them not wisely but too well is arguably superior to the original National Theatre production that played on Broadway in 2006, and has the overwhelming advantage of being performed in a very small theater (eighty-seven seats) in which the splendid performances of the ensemble cast can come through with breathtaking clarity. Now that a book of Louis Armstrong's collages has been published, a growing number of music lovers are becoming aware that the greatest jazz musician of the twentieth century was also a gifted amateur artist who decorated the boxes that held his reel-to-reel tape collection and the walls of his New York home with colorful scissors-and-Scotch-tape assemblages of newspaper and magazine clippings whose freely associational quality recalls the "visionary art" of untrained painters. Jazz at Lincoln Center is currently mounting an exhibition of large-scale reproductions of Armstrong's collages, and a selection of the fragile one-of-a-kind originals will also be on view at the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens through July 12. Armstrong had simplified and purified his flamboyant style by the time he signed with Decca in 1935, and no apologies of any kind need be made for the recordings he made with his big band and a delightfully wide variety of guest artists, including Sidney Bechet, Bing Crosby and the Mills Brothers. Every self-respecting record collection needs a generous slice of the collected works of Fats Waller, the stride pianist and comic singer whose 78s can put a smile on the sourest of faces.

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