September 2009
7 posts
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Maestros in the media
England’s Guardian, home to the finest classical music coverage on the planet and one of my favored media outlets, has been busily checking out maestros on the London scene. Ed Vullaimy annoints Valery Gergiev ‘the greatest conductor of his generation’, and offers this interview with the man himself:
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Tom Service of the same publication follows up with a...
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iMaestro
Now you know why that person beside you is waving an iPhone in cut time. More on the new Gustavo Dudamel app and the live webcast of his October 3 Hollywood Bowl concert at the conductor’s LA Phil microsite. [via Life’s a Pitch]
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Today's best 2.0 moment
Even cooler than performing the music of a superstar American composer … is being friends on Facebook ;)
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Sound friendships
Johannes Brahms’ intimate clarinet sonatas were, like much of his chamber music, first heard at small gatherings of his closest acquaintances. Throughout the fall of 1894 Brahms and his friend Richard Mühlfeld performed them several times in private soirées prior to their public premiere and publication the following year.
So it felt especially fitting to perform the second sonata last...
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Clarinet catalysts
This weekend I’ll be performing two seminal works of chamber music for clarinet, neither of which would exist if not for their respective composers’ fortuitous late-in-life encounters with virtuosos of the instrument.
Mozart’s Quintet K581 sprang from his unique relationship with clarinet entrepreneur Anton Stadler, which included their mutual participation in the Vienna...
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Orchestra in Technicolor
A look back to the end of last season and my second opportunity to perform Harold Arlen’s score to The Wizard of Oz live with the film. Large audiences, including hundreds of young people experiencing the movie and orchestral music for the first time, thrilled to the unforgettable sounds and images of Oz at two WCFSO performances in late April. Photographer Noah Henscheid was on...
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A world of sound
Ever wonder what Mozart sounds like on a two-stringed long neck lute from Xinjiang Uygur Zizhiqu Autonomous Province in China? Wonder no more:
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Arrangement for donbola of the rondo from Mozart’s Piano Sonata K. 331 Performer unknown – recorded by Colin Huehns in Shawan, China
This recording is one of thousands available on demand at the newly updated Archival Sound...