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Magnetic Fields setlist Harris Theater Chicago, IL 3/8/10

“What are you hoping to hear?”
“…Anything from 69 Love Songs would be great, I guess.”
“That’s tied up with an old relationship for me.”
“Yeah. I think we all have a little bit of that.”
First set
1. Kiss Me like You Mean It – 69 Love Songs, vol. 2
2. You Must Be out of Your Mind – Realism
3. [...]

New week – new music

The first Chicago appearances of both Corey Dargel and John Luther Adams fall in the next week, and I encourage everyone to get to both. Dargel has re-written what an art-song can be in our era, and beyond that dry description, his electronic art-songs are invariably touching and humane. Dargel is singing his one-year-old song [...]

Sold!

I will admit to being biased, but I have to say that the commercial for next season with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Riccardo Muti is pretty awesome by every measure — production values, photography, musical excitement, et cetera, et cetera:

There’s also this gem of a commercial, courtesy the Royal Opera House, for their production [...]

Tales of the Trumpet

I quit pursuing a career as a trumpet-player in the summer of 2001. This was after a year in the trumpet Master’s program at Indiana University, and as I watched (or, rather, heard) people play circles around me and realized I had technical problems that should have been ironed out when I was 19, and [...]

Let us now praise weird music

There’s something to be said for occasional music. Composers of note today don’t write a lot of it — a few birthday pieces here and there for various gray eminences (John Corigliano and Pierre Boulez for Sir Georg Solti), a commission as a memorial (9/11 nevr4get) or to, say, launch a new music director (Magnus [...]

You can get there from here

“Bird had a knack for getting from one note to another like nobody else.” That’s how Dizzy Gillespie summarized what made Charlie Parker stand out from everyone around him. Parker had the technique to run circles around people, and the harmonic ingenuity to upend jazz harmony as we knew it, but what made his playing [...]

My Pierre Project

When I started working at the Chicago Symphony, managing the various details of its record label CSO Resound, one of the most appealing aspects of it was that there would eventually be an album with Pierre Boulez. He’d already made many outstanding recordings with the orchestra for Deutsche Grammophon – a detailed survey of Bartok’s [...]

Anything Goes

New files were made publicly available yesterday from the Nixon Presidential Materials by the Nixon Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California. If there aren’t any smoking guns, or crass examples of Nixon behaving badly, there are documents that can help fill in some gaps, and connect some dots.
For one, there are several memos between [...]

New blog

Let’s give a warm welcome to Seated Ovation, a Chicago blog by “Billy” who’s already writing analyses of Chicago’s classical community worth one’s reading.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled reporting…

In Louis Menand’s New Yorker article (in the January 11 issue, and not available online) about the life and reception of Andy Warhol, there’s this intriguing fact:
“[Tony] Scherman and [David] Dalton report that a profile of Warhol, by David Bourdon, had been scheduled for the cover of Life, but that after [Robert] Kennedy’s death the [...]