And….we’re back. Team DecSimp moved from the South Side to the Near Northwest Side, ran the Chicago Marathon, and is now engaged in keeping a classical record label moving forward, because, much in the manner of a shark, if it isn’t moving forward, it is dead and the carcass is spending money for no good [...]
Danielle de Niese’s new Mozart album is out now, and received a big plug from the New York Times Magazine today, and therefore needs no further boost from me. But, it’s a splendid album of opera and concert arias, and you get to hear her with Bryn Terfel and the authoritative Sir Charles Mackerras and [...]
Names exist, partially, to remove doubt. We put them on things to eliminate what they are not as much as to say what they are. “What is [this]?” “It is [that].” Names also create attachments between the person, or people, who did the naming and the thing that’s been named; if you find a stray [...]
Nominally part of the Back the Bid program for Chicago 2016, the Chicago Symphony’s offer of three free downloads also makes for a thoughtful 9/11 memorial. From this page, you can download recordings of the CSO playing The Star-Spangled Banner and Stars & Stripes Forever, as well as the Olympic Anthem. The first two are led by [...]
“The Deeds campaign sent out a fundraising appeal with the thesis as its main focus. The state Democratic Party produced a video, “Bob McDonnell’s Secret Blueprint for Virginia,” setting a news report about the document to driving, apocalyptic classical music.”—Amy Gardner, Rosalind S. Helderman and Anita Kumar, writing about Virginia gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell’s graduate-school [...]
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, [...]
“I lit the lamps, put the kettle on to boil, and, to counter the noise of the discordant ship’s orchestra, plugged in a tape of Mozart’s clarinet quintet in A—the Amadeus Quartet, with Gervase de Peyer on clarinet. “First the violins, joined by cello and viola, made a hesitant, exploratory descent into the bass, where [...]
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 [...]
“Sentiments are very different from conventional facts,”—Seth Grimes, founder of Alta Plana, in the New York Times‘ “Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts.” They’re subjective, they’re open to interpretation. Thankfully. After all, no one ever sang “I’m Getting Factual over You.”
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 [...]