Part of our upcoming program this weekend, all centered around music concerned with the effects of war, is Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 4 in f minor. The symphony was premiered in April of 1935, and was given its US premiere by the Cleveland Orchestra in December of that same year. Vaughan Williams insisted
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I’ve been scouring YouTube for any new (and impressive) viola videos, and there are quite a few that I hadn’t seen before. If you are still of the notion that the viola is a second-string (sorry) instrument, then you are sadly misinformed! Enjoy.
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With my performance on Sunday finished, there was one more hurdle in store for me during my trip to Philadelphia. I had scheduled a lesson with my former teacher from Peabody Conservatory, Roberto Díaz. He had been the principal violist of the National Symphony when I’d studied with him in Baltimore, and he went on
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While the Classical Beaver makes it seem like we in the Oregon Symphony are doing keg stands, beer bongs, wet t-shirt competitions, and slathering sunscreen all over each other’s bodies during spring break, it’s often quite different for some of us. Yes, there are some lucky musicians who have scraped together the funds to head
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This week we’re rehearsing a piece that has two of the most difficult technical passages that I’ve run across thus far in my playing career. Unsurprisingly, it’s a symphony (No. 6) by Carl Nielsen. The last time I gnashed my teeth and rent my garments this much was for Nielsen’s Symphony No. 5. That one
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There are some clever people in this world. Do you remember the “Yo-Yo Shreds at the Inauguration” vid that popped up on YouTube? Then there was the “Perlman Shreds Winter”: Now, there is the “Berliner Philharmoniker Masterclass”: I was in tears for the last one – it’s a great job of dubbing over what the
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David Lau, who was a member of the Portland Youth Philharmonic and a winner of the Young Artists Concert competition, has won an audition to the august ensemble, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. You may have heard of one of their earlier music directors: Felix Mendelssohn. David studied at the Interlochen Arts Academy, the Juilliard School,
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We had a spate of auditions at the end of last season, and the results netted us three new musicians who are all now settled in Portland and playing with the orchestra. They are Principal timpanist Jonathan Greeney, oboist and English hornist Kyle Mustain, and violist Silu Fei. Here’s a little info about each: Jonathan
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I’ve decided to keep track of pieces that are excruciating for violists to play. There seems to be an evolving canon (a pantheon, if you will) of works which violists seem to universally dislike playing. Usually this is due to the physical demands of the piece. The viola needs a bit more effort to get the
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We in the little ‘viola nook’ behind stage left at our hall have a running joke about one of our frequent trombone subs, Henry Henniger, who looks a lot like our bass trombonist, Charles Reneau, known as ‘Charley’. It took some of us a long time to get Henry’s name right, so we just called
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via non divisi
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When it comes to most things in life, there isn’t much of an advantage of being older except for one thing: experience. When you live longer, you have more experiences, both good and bad. When I was in high school, and even college, there were many things that I know now that I wish I’d
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Well, it’s been quiet here at the blog for some time, so I thought it might be a good thing to tell you what I’ve been up to. I went down to Los Angeles this past Sunday to take the audition for the 3rd chair viola position (Assistant principal) of the Los Angeles Philharmonic on
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I’ve been living with the new Kim Kashkashian recording entitled Neharót for some time now, and find its title track Neharót Neharót (by the Israeli composer Betty Olivero, b.1954) to be one of the most affecting new pieces of music that I’ve encountered in the past decade. I liken its first impact on me to
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