There’s a new arts blog in town, and it is definitely one that you’ll want to add to your news reader. Oregon Arts Watch features journalistic heavyweights Barry Johnson (editor), Brett Campbell (music), Lisa Radon (visual arts), and Brian Libby (arts). Take a look around their offerings here.
From Alex’s blog today:
Spring for Music, which Tony Tommasini discussed in last Sunday’s New York Times, begins on Friday. Tickets are at most $25; WQXR will broadcast all the concerts live. I’m particularly looking forward to the Oregon Symphony’s war-torn program of Ives’s Unanswered Question, John Adams’s The Wound-Dresser (with the great Sanford Sylvan), Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem, and Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony….
My new toy, a little mini HD handheld digital video recorder, arrived in the mail today. This means that I can finally do some video posts on the blog! This is where your help comes in. Send me (either via the ‘contact me’ tab above, or in the comments section below) your suggestions of who in the Oregon Symphony universe I should interview … and, what question(s) I should ask them. It could be fun, it could be scary, and it could (but should not) be slightly inappropriate. So let ‘er rip!
Oregon Symphony principal second violin Chien Tan has launched a beautiful new blog recently, and it features an interview with an upcoming OSO soloist, violinist James Ehnes. I strongly encourage you to add Chien’s blog – Play-Violin.com – to your reading list!
Just read a great paragraph on why having all ages and levels of experience in an orchestra is so important, and why being ignorant of this is simply to be stupid:
Like fibers of a rope, not a single one of which runs the entire length, the overlapping career spans of musicians carry on the traditions of an orchestra. An orchestra without this linkage to the past isn’t really an orchestra in the way we currently think of one, it is merely a group of musicians, a pickup group. The attitudes of managers and boards of directors in some places, where they assume musicians are easily replaceable from the stocks of eager conservatory graduates (who, most importantly, would work for less money) are misguided at best, destructive, and not in the interest of the institutions they serve. Cut too many fibers, and the rope frays and breaks; braid in too many, and it becomes thick and inflexible.
From Bass Blog
