Add The Listening Sessions to your list of anonymous Chicago music blogs, which already includes Tonic Blotter and…um, yeah, the list kind of ends there, so far as I know. In the course of writing about the Saturday Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert, Mr. or Mrs. Listening Sessions (who goes by the nom de bloge The [...]
Anthony Tommasini, chief classical critic of the New York Times, has a tidy, 8-minute video up on the Times’ site. It’s titled “Bel Canto” and Tommasini gently explains the ways that composers and songwriters get melodies stuck in our heads, from Bach on up to Rufus Wainwright, Stephen Sondheim and Burt Bacharach. But the best part is seeing a [...]
“You cannot put lipstick on this pig.”-Christine Fair, South Asia expert for the RAND Corporation, on the likelihood that the Islamist terrorists responsible for the Mumbai bombings were homegrown, and not part of an international jihadist movement, in the New York Times. Given the tenets of sharia, this could also be the Inapt Female Beautification Metaphor [...]
One of those nasty stories that has a way of focusing your thinking ran in today’s business section in the NYT. Atlantic Records, a subsidiary of Warner Music Group, reported that revenue from digital-downloads outstripped revenue from physical CDs this year. Unit sales of downloads surpassed CDs for the first time in 2007, as the [...]
UK-music critic Jessica Duchen takes issue with the classical MSM (becoming less MS by the day) naming the world’s greatest orchestras. In that Internet-ty, bottom-up, way, she proposes an election to determine the greatest living conductor. She opened it up to her readers over the weekend to determine the ten who’d be on the ballot, [...]
Riccardo Muti on Mahler, Fourth Symphony, at 6:23: httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbV3UK_7O9U From the documentary Conducting Mahler.
Chicagoans take a lot of crap for their (our, mine) inferiority complex, and feeling the need to trumpet our accomplishments and greatness to the world, which so often doesn’t seem to notice. But that sense of inferiority is absolutely bludgeoned by the crowd that insists that classical music is dying. Or that orchestral music is [...]
The Chicago Symphony took fifth place in Gramophone‘s listing of the world’s greatest orchestras. I’ve always hated this orchestral-ranking sort of thing, because at this level, “best” isn’t really the best way to talk about them. Chicago has a sound that goes “through” you, as I’ve explained it to friends; the New York Philharmonic plays Gershwin [...]
I sang in the choir for a performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony in grad school (second bass), drove to Chicago from Bloomington to hear Pierre Boulez conduct it with the Chicago Symphony, and heard it for the first time performed by the Muncie Symphony Orchestra. And who could forget the CSO’s performance in 2006 with [...]
You have to hand it to the members of the Riverside County Philharmonic who filmed a chunk of the California wildfire as they drove to their gig. At the same time, it is Hollywood, even if Riverside is halfway on the road to nowhere. (Believe me, I’ve driven out there.) In LA, musicians film what’s exciting [...]