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at the beach

by Charles Noble on January 22, 2012 · 1 comment

Back February 1st – Aloha!

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kalmar up for houston job?

01.21.2012

It is never a sure thing who an orchestra is really considering when they are looking for a new music director. Some conductors don’t want to be seen as ‘auditioning’ for the gig, and orchestras are often competing for the same scarce resource: a good conductor. So it pays to be cagey about just who

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don’t mess with a trumpeter

01.18.2012

It seems that a member of the San Francisco Symphony was doing some soft practicing in his apartment recently, and received for his troubles a very rude and irate phone message. Here’s what he did next…

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bells and brass

01.18.2012

There were two major highlights to last weekend’s classical series concerts with the Oregon Symphony: Joshua Bell and our brass section. Due to changes in his calendar, Bell dropped the Shostakovich First Violin Concerto for the Brahms Violin Concerto. Basically, he was to perform the piece publicly for the first time this season, but several

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arnica quartet tickets now on sale

01.17.2012

The Arnica Quartet is presenting their second concert of the season in Portland on Friday, March 23 at 7:30 p.m. at the Community Music Center. The concert is part of the month-long March Music Moderne festival curated by Bob Priest. The concert features music by some of the greatest composers from the 17th – 21st

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conspiracy theories

01.15.2012

Once again I made the mistake of reading the auditions forum at the myauditions.com website. Once again, there are conspiracy theories being proposed about the results of another major audition – in this case the recent Boston Symphony percussion auditions (one of the winners is a current member of our section here in Oregon). This

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another oso musician goes to boston symphony

01.13.2012

Matthew McKay, who just joined the Oregon Symphony percussion section this season, has won a position in the venerable Boston Symphony. He will be joining former OSO cellist Adam Esbensen, who left for the BSO in 2008. Problematic for the Oregon Symphony percussion section is that the runner-up in the audition that Matt won here

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going postal on cellphones

01.12.2012

You’ve no doubt heard by now about the cellphone stare-down at the New York Philharmonic’s recent performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony between music director Alan Gilbert and a stubborn cellphone user in the front rows of Avery Fisher Hall. I was reading some of the comments to both the original blog posting about the incident

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quasthoff retires

01.11.2012

The great German baritone Thomas Quasthoff today announced his retirement from the concert stage. It has come as a shock to much of the close-knit classical music and opera world. I had the pleasure of sharing the stage with him a few times over the course of my career, and they have always been moments

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new year, new principal flute

01.09.2012

This week marks the first official week of work for our newly-hired principal flutist, Jessica Sindell. She is a wonderful player, and perhaps even better, a sparkling personality whose smile can already be seen lighting up even the most dreary of rehearsals. Jessica is a graduate of the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New

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new routines

01.06.2012

As 2012 begins, I decided that, rather than make a few resolutions that I wouldn’t honor, I would do some new work on the viola. Here’s what I’ve been thinking about over the last few days.

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my top musical experiences of 2011

12.31.2011

I’m sure that I will have forgotten something obvious, and except for item #1, the list is roughly in reverse chronological order. Send in your favorites from 2011 in the comments section below. The Oregon Symphony’s Carnegie Hall debut. It would be hard to top this one. I’d been to Carnegie before, but with Pink

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another best of 2011 for the oregon symphony

12.31.2011

James Manishen of the Winnipeg Free Post has put up his top ten recordings of classical music for 2011, and the Oregon Symphony’s Music for a Time of War made #3. See the other musical and arts genre lists here. 1. Glenn Gould, On Television: The Complete CBC Broadcasts 1954-1977 This 19-hour, 10 DVD set is

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young conductor

12.29.2011

This one just made me smile: an 8 year old came up and tried his hand at conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in the witches’ ride section of Humperdinck’s opera “Hansel and Gretel”. Cuteness ensues.

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what might have been

12.27.2011

If you’re still smarting about Joshua Bell’s decision to change his program from Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto to the Brahms, then you can take solace in this amazing performance by Hillary Hahn with Mariss Jansons and the Berlin Philharmonic from Suntory Hall in Tokyo, Japan. To see the whole concert you’ll need to be a

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