Brian Dickie (Free subscription) | 11/08/2009
Last night's birthday concert for the Canadian Opera Company was to have been a grand Ben Hepner concert. Poor Ben, and how remorseful he must have felt, had to cancel at a very late stage. The magicians of the COC,...
Indy Star (Free subscription) | 11/08/2009
It's ironic that the label on Saturday night's Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra concert was "Freedom Without Walls" -- a slogan even available on T-shirts for sale in the lobby -- when walls had so much to do with its success.
The Irish Times (Free subscription) | 11/06/2009
RTÉ’s flagship morning show celebrated a 25-year journey from the era of David Hanly to Twitter, writesROSITA BOLAND
3quarksdaily (Free subscription) | 11/05/2009
Meera Lee Sethi in Inkling Magazine: In the second section of Samuel Barber’s exquisitely mournful composition “Adagio for Strings,” the cellos, violas, and violins join together to build to a rising melodic climax, reaching a thrilling, almost keening peak of...
Culture Monster (Free subscription) | 10/31/2009
Christoph Eschenbach has been on a hot streak with the Los Angeles Philharmonic lately, having turned in some intense, highly individual performances of Mahler’s Sixth and Bruckner’s Seventh Symphonies in his last two visits. The Philharmonic probably thought it would...
humanities researcher (Free subscription) | 10/26/2009
One of the most useful binary oppositions in literary theory is that between mimesis and diegesis, or between showing and telling. To over-simplify: a play like Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida shows the action; an epic poem like the Odyssey narrates the action in involuted folds of narrative, forwards and backwards like Penelope's shuttle. (And yes, Auerbach's Mimesis is indeed one of my
local Cut (Free subscription) | 10/21/2009
A brief note on the logistics of this tour: Thao/PCP and David Schultz are on tour from Oct 15 – Nov 21. Beyond playing with Cello Project Thao and her band the Get Down Stay Down have been asking me to join them as their multi-instrumentalist, so there are times when this blog will kind [...] Related posts: CD Reviews: Portland Cello Project, Sapient Portland Razing Mississippi: Portland Cello...
bara brith (Free subscription) | 10/20/2009
Page turning! I' prefer to play the notes most of the time. Anyway, that most unpleasant of tasks passed off OK tonight. One of the pieces by Granados was in an unfamiliar Russian (what else?) edition, printed on paper that I'm not prepared to describe here, as I can only be crude about it and after the first turn I had to remain standing holding the pages so that the they did not fall back. None of...
Aural States (Free subscription) | 10/12/2009
Last weekend, a wonderful conjunction took place among the Baltimore-Washington musical spheres: Bartók’s music overtook its two great concert halls on the very same night. To compare Baltimore’s own playing Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra and the NSO’s take on Bartók’s The Wooden Prince is like pitting a Shakespeare tragedy against one of his comedies,...
Cincinnati Enquirer (Free subscription) | 10/10/2009
William Eddins was the busiest person on the planet, alternately standing and conducting, then sitting and tackling the glittering runs and syncopated rhythms of a Gershwin piano concerto with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.
Cellomania (Free subscription) | 10/09/2009
I am really struggling to increase tempos on the concert pieces - we have our first full rehearsal on Sunday and I am nowhere near ready. I "know" the notes for most of the pieces, but I'm still way off on tempos, way off. I'd begun early last month learning the pieces by playing through them slowly, making small tempo changes every three or four days, and practicing at each new speed until...
wears the trousers magazine (Free subscription) | 10/07/2009
Emily Jane White Victorian America ••• Talitres Emily Jane White’s 2008 debut Dark Undercoat heralded the arrival of a new exponent of the ‘dark-folk’ genre (say what'), and it’s precisely from where that album left off that Victorian America picks up the thread, ambling gloomily along in the same bleeding vein of evocative lyrics and tasteful acoustic arrangements...
APO Music Director (Free subscription) | 09/30/2009
So, here's some things to remember from Sunday's rehearsal about the first movement of the Beethoven: - The tricky opening, which I mentioned in Monday's blog 2nds and violas, you know what to do! - The first subject, which of course appears first up in the cellos, needs to flow all the time, even though it's not particularly melodious. It tends to get a bit stodgy, otherwise. From 23-34, remember...
NewsLite (Free subscription) | 09/22/2009
An artist has created a life-sized and fully functional cello out of LEGO bricks. 34-year-old Nathan Sawaya has made a career out of sculpting amazing structures with the classic toy. But his latest project was music the the ears of LEGO fans and saw him build the musical instrument using thousands of tiny bricks. While at first glance you might not notice the cellos odd construction, even Nathan...
VEACE (Free subscription) | 09/10/2009
Watching Obama. I honestly can't believe how fucking HARD it is to get this healthcare shit passed. I hate these rich republican fucks. I took a xanax and drank two mojitos and now I feel like I'm floating. It's awesome. Obama: "I will not accept the status quo. Not this time." Do you think any of these bastards have actually personally known poor people? Or sick people? Did Biden just fall...
Videos