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Abu Bratsche, Musings of a lead viola operatortheafmobserver.typepad.com/abu_bratsche/ |
Such a versatile instrument
Musicians to the ice floes, please (cross-posted from the Polyphonic blog) If one single factor underlies the turmoil at the New Hampshire Music Festival in the minds of the musicians and the external support group SOON, it appears to ...
When the excellent becomes the enemy of everything (cross-posted from the Polyphonic blog) While doing some research on the New Hampshire Music Festival situation, I came across a blog post by Henry Fogel that I found both interesting on its merits an...
A Coup-de-Festival (cross-posted from the Polyphonic blog) A friend of mine alerted me last week to a recent series of events at the New Hampshire Music Festival. I've been trying to make sense of what I've read in news...
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Arts Journal MusicMusic News From Around the Net |
How Do You Win That Orchestra Spot? Get In The Minivan Facing a 26-hour drive from Winnipeg to his D.C. audition with the National Symphony Orchestra, timpanist Jauvon Gilliam "called up timpanists in major American orchestras along the way and asked if h...
Roman Functionaries Stop Concert Because It Was Closing Time An official at the Pantheon interrupted a recent performance by the Russian ensemble Bach-Consort by walking into the performing area and announcing that the concert was over because closing time was ...
Back In Samuel Barber's Day, He Was No Critics' Favorite "In particular, critic and composer Virgil Thomson dismissed Barber as a composer for 'high middlebrow taste.' And Barber's music does sound conservative next to the atonal, modernist style in vogue i...
For City Opera, 2010-11 To Be Another Slender Season But general manager and artistic director George Steel "said that this season City Opera expects to balance its budget for the first time in years. 'The company is light-years ahead of where we were l...
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Slipped DiscNorman Lebrecht on Shifting Sound Worlds |
News just in: Philip Langridge has died The great English tenor, the outstanding Peter Grimes and Aschenbach of recent years, has succumbed to a rapid, aggressive cancer. He was 71. The last time I saw him was in Harrison Birtwistle's late...
How critics make up their minds Coming out of a premiere at the Young Vic last night, I overheard the following exchange between two of the attending critics, one of them a recent appointment. Critic A: I know we shouldn't share, bu...
Breaking news: English National Opera goes bilingual The tenor in Elixir of Love called in with a sore throat. His understudy went missing and no-one else in the world had memorised the new street-cred English translation of Donizetti's village comedy. ...
There may be no votes in it, but - The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has launched a new strategy on music education, in and out of schools. The low-cost initiative, announced today on London's South Bank, puts cash into new link...
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The Artful ManagerAndrew Taylor on the Business of Arts & Culture |
Generosity and curiosity Yet more compelling and inspiring words from Ben Cameron of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation during his recent talk at TEDxYCC in Calgary. Well worth a watching.
Unbundling the arts organization My conversations at the Salzburg Global Seminar last week reinforced the inherent tensions in the business of arts and culture. Example 1: We build organizations to resolve cost and scale problems. Or...
Art. It's what's inside. Redux. Way back in June 2008, I posted an 'open-source public service announcement' concept and media mock-up called ''Art. It's what's inside.'' Since I didn't have the means or the channel to produce a pro...
Great answers to bad questions I've noticed a general agreement that the arts and culture world needs 'problem solvers,' people who can advance creative solutions with limited resources. But from observing countless cultural conver...
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The Rest is NoiseAlex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker |
Listen To This I have a habit of finishing books in hotels. I sent off The Rest Is Noise from the Omni in downtown Los Angeles; Listen To This, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish at the end of September, w...
Noise everywhere The phrase "The rest is noise" keeps showing up in unexpected places. Earlier I noted the opening of the club The Rest Is Noise in Brixton, London: The Armed Forces, a Nashville-based gutter-pop band,...
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SANDOWGreg Sandow on the future of classical music |
Nose -- quick review ADDED LATER: The future of classical music connection. Too often we worship at the shrine of the great composers, and react as if every note they wrote needs to be taken very seriously. Which means we...
Something to talk about As a comment to my "Getting around" post (though really to the piece about composers that I wrote for Peabody Magazine and spoke about in the post)), Xavier Losada wrote this:I totally agree with you!...
Getting around I've written a piece about composers and their audience for Peabody Magazine, a publication of the Peabody Institute. It's the kind of thing some people might call a provocation, but I don't mean it t...
Good beginning This, too, is a "solutions" post. I've mentioned that I'm artist in residence this year and next at the University of Maryland, with a mandate to work with students at the music school there, to help ...
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From the Orchestra Librarykschnack.wordpress.com/ |
Yes, Melissa, there is a Santa Claus In the past couple of weeks as we have pushed through the final edits of Moldydow and the Vlasts, DSO Assistant Librarian Melissa Rogers has exhorted me — only half kidding — to “ple...
Z!#&?esk?%#luh??@a^($h?!! Sincere apologies to Czech musicians and citizens, and Mr. Smetana of course, for defacing the lovely name of the 4th movement of M?last, but we are just ready to be so DONE with this project. Really...
Mein Vaterland, Mein Gott! I had a library nightmare over the holidays, and I don’t mean that figuratively. You know those performance anxiety nightmares players can have over a particular piece that’s difficult or...
I Lost December Well, I didn’t plan to take a 4-week break from writing the blog, but December got the best of me. This is probably not unusual for people in our business; in my case, I just seem to have taken...