October 2009
7 posts
4 tags
Creepy cover
Following up on my last post about the record business, it seems the classical music segment of that industry has had something to offer after all – hideous album covers! Here is a particularly ghastly one, perfect for Halloween:
Discovered via a recent installment of the very funny ‘Greatest Classical CD Covers EVER’ series at Too Many Tristans, where it is suggested that ‘a...
5 tags
Free is good
If you care about music, find an hour to listen to this week’s episode of On the Media from NPR:
Click to listen →
download mp3 version
As the program makes clear, nothing could be better for creatives and performers [not to mention listeners] than the complete breakdown of the twentieth-century music industry business model in the face of the persistent openness of the internets and...
1 tag
A day in the life ...
… of a twenty-first century music director.
7:30am – Making final corrections to Mahler 5 parts for November 14 9:00am – Musical storytelling at a local elementary school, narrating Ferdinand the Bull with violinist Philip Wharton and playing Peter and the Wolf excerpts 10:00am – More musical storytelling 12:00pm – Old media: Live TV appearance on the KWWL news All day – New media:...
2 tags
Have you heard?
Alex Ross is required reading for followers of classical music, and this week he augments his New Yorker work with a new blog for the magazine called Unquiet Thoughts. If you haven’t already encountered ‘the hilarity, the profundity, the delicious recipes’ of his writing at The Rest Is Noise and in the book of the same name, think of the new site launch as a good opportunity to...
2 tags
cLAssical
I went to many concerts at the Los Angeles Music Center as an aspiring teenage musician, but I never saw it look like this!
Click on the image for an interactive 360-degree view of the outdoor audience for Gustavo Dudamel’s first concert as music director of the LA Phil by Bryan Chan. The music is City Noir, a new work by John Adams. [via Los Angeles Times Culture Monster]
6 tags
Previewing Elgar
Here is my Iowa Public Radio interview with Jacqueline Hallbloom previewing tomorrow’s WCFSO performance of the Elgar concerto with cellist Zuill Bailey.
Click to listen →
Interview with Jacqueline Hallbloom – mp3
Iowa Public Radio – October 2009
4 tags
Cello, live and alive
On Saturday night the WCFSO will be joined by cellist Zuill Bailey for a performance of Edward Elgar’s stirring 1919 concerto. The piece’s performance history is dominated by English virtuoso Jacqueline du Pré, whose readings clearly lived up to to Elgar’s own characterization of the work as ‘alive’. [Du Pré was closely associated with the concerto from her first...