By Martin Steinberg, a supervising editor for The Associated Press, is also a cellist who played at Carnegie Hall on Jan. 19 for the first time. 

NEW YORK (AP) - The staging area was much smaller than expected, but the two 12-foot-high (3.6-meter-high) doors loomed like the Great Gate of Kiev. As I walked through the doorway, I thought of some of the people who had been there before - Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Mahler, Horowitz, Heifetz, Casals, Piatigorsky, Bernstein, Stern.