Sunset from our dorm room at Bastyr University Photo: © Charles Noble It’s about 10:30 pm on Tuesday night – it’s been about a hour or so since the end of our penultimate faculty concert at the Max Aronoff Viola Institute. There was some major restructuring of the program tonight because our pianist, Duane Hulbert,
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Just saw this message on Edmonton Symphony music director William Eddins’ facebook page: ATTN ALL VIOLISTS – The Edmonton Symphony Orchestra is holding International auditions for our Section Viola opening on Monday, 28 September, 2009. Guaranteed clean audition, wonderful orchestra, one of the best halls in North America. Come one, come all!!!! For more information
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Tonight was one of those nights where I was intimately reconnected with why I became a performer in the first place. It’s about people. The person the composer, who in their genius rendered their innermost thoughts into sublime music. The person the performer, who studied for years to be able to recreate and interpret that
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Guarneri Quartet – Photo © Dorothea von Haeften I’m out of town this week, and so have missed my chance to hear the Guarneri Quartet for one last time. I’ve heard some later performances, and sure, the group has succombed to the ravages of age to some extent. But their musicianship has never faltered. I
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Jun Iwasaki Photo: Absolute Images If you’re interested in hearing the performance of Mendelssohn’s great Octet for strings from Chamber Music Northwest last week, you can now hear the performance available online for streaming over the internet at InstantEncore.com. The performance features Oregon Symphony concertmaster Jun Iwasaki along with an all-star cast of CMNW regulars.Â
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Just had my first hack-through of the La Campanella with my wonderful pianist (Sandra Bleiweiss). What a shock the first run-through often can be! Carefully thought-out interpretive decisions seem unbelievably stupid and inane. Tempos seem either naive or hideously self-conscious. Mainly, after the run-through of the Paganini, my thought was “why?!” As in, why did
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Student performers at the 2008 Max Aronoff Viola Institute Photo © Charles Noble On Thursday we venture North to Seattle to begin rehearsals for the faculty performances at the 19th edition of the Max Aronoff Viola Institute. I co-founded MAVI with my undergrad teacher Joyce Ramée, and it’s been going strong ever since. The festival
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String players have both the benefit and curse of being able to play more than one note at a time. This technique is known as double-stopping (i.e. putting fingers down (stopping) two strings at once, and bowing the two strings simultaneously). Unlike other instruments with strings (the piano or guitar for example), we don’t have
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I’ve been thinking, over the past several days, about the purpose of the arts. Sure, they stimulate the economy to a greater extent than almost any other entertainment form in proportion to dollars spent. But, there is much, much more to it than that. I’ve been working on Kryzstof Penderecki’s Cadenza for solo viola over
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Conductor Bill Eddins has a great post on the issues facing orchestras in the face of massive shrinkage of their endowment principal and subsequent attempts to adapt to what many are referring to has “the new normal”. Here are two paragraphs that I found particularly interesting:
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In this month’s Atlantic, there is a set of 15 mini articles gathered under the heading “15 Ways to Change the World“. One of these, by Felix Salmon, is entitled “Pay the Artists”. Here it is [emphasis mine]: We’re living in a newly frugal world. But the rediscovered values of thrift and moderation should apply
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There have been several articles in the local press about the current Oregon Symphony financial situation: High/low times for the Oregon Symphony [David Stabler/Oregonian] The Oregon Symphony cuts back [David Stabler/Oregonian/video] Arts groups in a fiscal thicket [Bob Hicks/ArtScatter.com] Since we’re about to enter into negotiations between musicians and management, it’s not really time for
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Sergey Antonov performs Tchaikovsky at this year’s Astoria Music Festival. Antonov photos: Sheryl Todd/Astoria Daily Photo [click to enlarge] We had a lovely week of rehearsals and concerts for the first week of the Astoria Music Festival. Last Friday’s concert was the opening concert with the Astoria Music Festival Orchestra under the direction of conductor
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The site has been down for a couple days as it was moved to a new privately hosted server. This should mean that it will respond quicker to requests for pages and provide a more reliable platform. Sorry that there were a few hiccups along the way. I’ll give a recap of the first weekend
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Ugh, it’s that late-night-getting-ready-to-leave-for-a-few-days-at-a-festival madness, and as usual, I’m not at all keen about leaving home. It’s always difficult to maintain any sort of practicing routine when you’re away from home. You might not have any privacy, or won’t want to disturb your hosts, or you just might be too tired. Or all of the
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