Deceptively Simple

Leonard Bernstein would have been 91 today, and while there were many celebrations last year, this year DecSimp is starting a bandwagon of one, and gives you the Bernstein-honoring Playlist for the 91st birthday.
Bach Magnificat in D Major Schola Cantorum, New York Philharmonic (Sony Classical). This is one of the great pre-historically informed-practice recordings, with [...]

A sad note to make, as tubist Abe Torchinsky died last Tuesday, according to an obituary late last week in the Philadelphia Inquirer. He was 89, and was the Philadelphia Orchestra’s tubist from 1949 to 1972, having been hired by Eugene Ormandy. Torchinsky also played on the famous album of Gabrieli canzonas with the combined [...]

Single tickets for the Chicago Symphony’s 2009-2010 season go on sale today. I trust that Riccardo Muti’s leadership of Brahms’s German Requiem needs no blogosphere-inspired inducement, but feel strongly that pianist Paul Lewis’s CSO debut with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 12, Redmoon Theater’s giving an assist to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, Boulez’s conducting Boulez (and The [...]

I don’t know if this is tongue-in-cheek or not, but …And You Will Know Us by Our Trail of Dead name-checks Hilary Hahn as a “related” artist for the September 25 show at Chicago’s Logan Square Auditorium. While she has collaborated outside her classical-comfort zone with Josh Ritter and Tom Brosseau, I think it’s safe to [...]