“Standard Time” is a title with built-in friction in New York, where schedules, subways, and stages run on shared hours even as the city never quite moves in unison. At Carnegie Hall, the program frames rock and pop performance as a kind of timekeeping, with Michael Feinstein and Standard Time moving between eras and references rather than treating the songbook as fixed. There is no clear NYC premiere history attached to the work, but its cultural significance here is practical and familiar: it tests how tradition holds up when played in a room built for formal listening. One useful measure is how well it makes “standard” feel newly negotiated.