The biggest musical news coming out of Baltimore these days has to do with one of the 10 biggest orchestras in the land—the Baltimore Symphony. Despite receiving perplexed looks from people outside the curved lobby windows of the Meyerhoff for a decision to remedy years of operating in the red by dipping into their endowment, […]
This past July, I had the great honor of playing a concert on the Ocean Grove Summer Stars series with the phenomenal accordionist Lidia Kaminska and everyone’s favorite tech-blogging pianist Hugh Sung. We weren’t quite sure in the beginning how the unusual combination of instruments was going to work out, but I think it’s fair […]
And the winner is . . . The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross! Scott Spiegelberg’s semi-annual listing of the top 50 classical music blogs (top 53 this time) is out and it’s no surprise that Herr Ross tops that list. SLN is honored to be included amongst the best of the rest coming in […]
The 21st century musician: “The model player is not just a technical whiz but also a musician who can converse with the public, meld into an ensemble, generate interesting programming ideas, schmooze with donors and teach.”
From Daniel J. Wakin’s feature on the New World Symphony in today’s Times.
I’m in Roanoke, VA this weekend performing with the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra. In honor of Valentine’s Day, our program is titled Dance and Romance and features its fair share of saxophone. (Because what instrument’s more romantic than saxophone? Really?) Truth be told, it’s the most playing I’ve ever done on a single orchestra gig. Two […]
Tim Page on Marin Alsop as she prepares to take the helm of the BSO:
“Right now, if I were asked whether I’d rather hear Temirkanov or Alsop in Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, Sibelius, Shostakovich—in virtually any of the masterpieces in the standard repertory—I’d go for Temirkanov in a hummingbird’s heartbeat. But if I were asked […]
After 30 years of study, Martin Jarvis, a professor at Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Australia, has concluded that some of J. S. Bach’s most famous works, including his Six Cello Suites, were not written by Bach, but by his second wife Anna Magdalena Bach. He points to the fact that the only complete manuscript […]
I’m sure the Boston Symphony didn’t mean to fan the flames with this announcement, but the orchestra will now be offering a free podcast that features video lectures about its two-year Beethoven/Schoenberg series. As reported in PlaybillArts, the short videos (one to five minutes for the concentration-impaired) will discuss important works by each composer and […]
Correction: SLN apologizes profusely to the wonderful visual artist Margaret Koscielny for wrongly attributing the comments below made by a reader to her.
TAFTO month is wrapping up over at Adaptistration so it’s about time I took care of some unfinished business. A reader posed an intriguing question in the comments section, and since my contribution […]