We finished our second of three subscription concerts tonight – a big program of Dvorak, Rachmaninoff and Strauss. It’s so interesting to me the differences in the personalities of the audiences each night. Usually Saturday night’s audience (which used to the famous “Tuesday Nighters”) is pretty boisterous and excitable. There are usually quite a few
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Today and yesterday at rehearsal I was so nostalgic during the Rachmaninoff 2nd piano concerto. Usually I get into the music (more or less) during the rehearsals, which leaves me free to concentrate on execution during the concerts. Yes – that’s what I said! I find that I need to have a certain margin of
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pianist Valentina Lisitsa This weekend’s first subscription concert at the Oregon Symphony is pretty much a must-see/hear. There’s a terrific piece of Dvorak – his Symphonic Variations – that I’ll bet you’ve never heard live before (and maybe not even on a recording) – but which is both totally charming and an orchestral showpiece. Then
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Courtesy of the new-ish blog Classical in Seattle, a link to this past season’s semi-staged production ofBluebeard’s Castle by the Seattle Symphony. Renowned (and also perhaps a bit over-hyped) glass artist Dale Chihuly was commissioned to produce blown glass pieces to represent what was revealed behind each door. In case you aren’t familiar with this
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A clip of perhaps my favorite living pianist, Martha Argerich, performing the last movement of the Tchaikovsky 1st Concerto. Hair-raisingly good and exciting! I must hear her live sometime…
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Last night, finally, the regular season was underway! It was a typical gala opening night affair – sold out house (thank goodness!), well-to-do patrons dressed to the nines, the women of the orchestra bedecked in extra spangles and bling (allowed in the dress code specially for the occasion) and a program guaranteed to please most
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Every now and then I stumble upon some insight that really throws me. These gems, big and small, rough or brilliantly polished, turn my conceptions of the world upside down, make me think of things anew, and get me to question what I know of myself and my view of the world. Today I was
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As I noted when Ellen DePaquale resigned in protest from the Cleveland Orchestra last year, when internal orchestral machinations make the media, you know that something major has gone on behind the scenes. Philadelphia Inquirer classical music critic Peter Dobrin writes in his blog about the grievance process filed by Philadelphia Orchestra principal cellist Hai-ye
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Photo: Richard Termine for the New York Times She’s appearing with the OSO this season, and by the sound of this review in the New York Times, you’d better score your tickets sooner than later, she’s red hot. Here’s an excerpt from the review by Times writer Stephen Holden: It is fascinating to watch the
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Just picked this up off of Sheridan’s blog – too good to pass up. It really is viola playing in a nutshell – you watch and listen, waiting for the seemingly inevitable car wreck… Sheridan, by the way, was a classmate of mine at the Peabody Conservatory, where she studied with BSO principal violist Richard
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Tonight occurred the annual rite of passage that heralds the beginning of a new classical concert season in this country: Live from Lincoln Center’s live telecast of the Opening Night Gala of the New York Philharmonic. It was hardly a ground-breaking tv event: Yo-yo Ma played the Dvorak Cello Concerto for the 80,000th time, and
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34.83 miles, 1250 ft of cumulative elevation gain, 12.9 mph avg speed Time for a beer or two… Click here for a map of the route. Click the image for the gory details!
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Just a shameless plug: the Arnica Quartet will be giving a performance at the Loucks Lecture Hall of the Salem Public Library (central branch on Liberty Street) on Sunday, September 16th at 3:00 p.m. We’ll be playing an early Haydn quartet (Op. 20 no. 4), the lone quartet of Claude Debussy, and the Brahms Piano
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The Houston Symphony has come out with a collection of trading cards with the photos and interesting info about the players of the orchestra. Check out the article here. I remember a couple of years ago the OSO almost did this in conjunction with Franz Bakery – they were to have been distributed in specially
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Giancarlo Guerrero, currently music director of the Eugene Symphony, has accepted the position of music director with the Nashville Symphony, effective the 2009-2010 season. Read more here. You can find his blog here.
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