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A picture is worth a thousand words. Moving pictures, millions?
This Saturday at 2 p.m. on The MTT Files Michael Tilson Thomas explores virtuosity; violinist Jascha Heifetz's in particular. It's one thing to hear recordings, another to see the virtuoso in action. Here, Jascha Heifetz performs a Bach Chaconne.
Congratulations to Davidson resident, WDAV listener and Main Street Sessions musician Henry Lebedinsky for tackling Performance Today's weekly quiz feature, The Piano Puzzler this past Wednesday! If you missed it when it aired, you can hear how he fared by clicking here.
The Executive Committee of the Charlotte Symphony Board of Directors has named Board Chair Richard J. Osborne as interim Executive Director of the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra (CSO), effective July 24, 2007. Former Executive Director Richard L. Early will support the transition until his departure on September 1, 2007.
The Board has established a search committee to oversee the hiring of a new, full-time Executive Director. Michael Marsicano, President and CEO of Foundation for the Carolinas and a CSO board member, will chair the committee, which will include CSO board members Catherine Connor, Linda Daleure, Craig D. Smith, Michael Williams, and Richard Osborne (ex-officio) and community volunteers Robin Branstrom, Amy Blumenthal, and Tony McNeill, Director of Music Ministries at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church. The committee hopes to recruit a new Executive Director within the next six months.
Within the last week there’s been both sad news and happy news from the world of American classical music.
The sad news is also tinged with an element of shock. Earlier this week, tenor Jerry Hadley died in a hospital in Poughkeepsie, NY. You can find out more about it here.
Part of what makes this untimely loss both tragic and upsetting is that Hadley died from injuries caused by his own hand. His final years were plagued by a series of personal and professional disappointments which stood in stark contrast to the sunny vitality of his much admired voice.
But even as one figure passes from the musical stage, another enters with the promise of a wonderful career. The New York Philharmonic announced the successor to music director Loren Maazel. It’ll be 40 year old Alan Gilbert. You can learn about Gilbert’s background here.
He has a lot going for him, including the fact that both of his parents were orchestra members at one time, and that he was born and raised in the city. Despite its standing as an international institution, the New York Philharmonic is the Big Apple’s own orchestra, and it means a lot to music lovers in the city that this will be the Philharmonic’s first hometown music director. It’s also exciting to see the wave of youthful, American conductors taking up the baton – literally and figuratively – passed by a generation of aging Europeans. It’s an all too rare sign of hope and optimism in a field too often brought down by predictions of doom and gloom.
Watch George Gershwin play "I Got Rhythm":
Here's a sampling of what people are doing with recordings other than listening to them.
As for CDs, they lend themselves readily to making models of Saturn.
This CD Daisy Puppet calls for felt, wiggle eyes and "an old green sock":
Alongside classics like the CD Coaster and CD Clock this CD Disco Ball (which can double as a holiday ornament) really shines:
Sick of receiving those free trial CDs from AOL in the mail? Here's a list of 101 uses for them, the most festive of which is this Christmas tree:
Let's not leave out cassette tapes! Here are directions for fashioning a wallet from a cassette tape.
Remember mix tapes? Some are works of art in and of themselves. View image
This remarkable website shows how one artist is fashioning fashion from cassette tape, weaving it into "sonic fabric":
Crochet your thing? Here's a cassette tape evening bag and a Granny Square Motif Bag stitched using tape.
In this ultimate act of recycling, a woman knits old cassette tape into a case for her new iPod.
Don't throw away the cassette case! Slightly modified, it can be used as an iPod stand.
Feeling more destructive than creative? Here's a way to get some flashy entertainment value from those unwanted CDs. (It's also a great way to get even with those tunes that make you cringe.) Hint: Set your microwave power level on "High":
This video clip sharing is such fun, how about another? Here's legendary Danish pianist and entertainer Victor Borge's visit with The Muppets. He performs Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 with Rowlf, the dog:
Presenting the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra. Watch and listen as this unusual crew selects produce, prepares instruments and performs aural salad:
My twelve-year-old son turned to me and said, "She's like a Samurai." Evelyn Glennie had just performed Schwantner's Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra at the Eastern Music Festival in Greensboro. On my feet and applauding wildly I leaned over and replied, "That's it. You nailed it."
Watching Evelyn Glennie perform is transformative. Beyond the obvious layers--extraordinary precision and musicianship on par with any of history's great virtuosos--is something profound; something I promised myself to never forget I'd witnessed.
For me, there's nothing in Schwantner's Concerto for Percussion that's deliberately sentimental or touching. The music serves different purposes. Discovering tears in my eyes three times during the performance, I was left to figure out why. One thing was clear: It was Evelyn. The sparkle in her performance would have prevailed had all the sound been sucked from that hall. It was in her body language. It was in the way she put stick or mallet to instrument with sage-like delivery of each and every strike, no matter how loudly or softly, how rapidly in succession, how assertively or compassionately. There was graceful leadership, too, in the way she leaned into the music, turning her left cheek to feel it, bending forward to connect solar plexus with sound. These were wise, loving, teaching gestures; the body language of a high priestess healing a wounded warrior.
What fearlessness. Nothing gets in Evelyn Glennie's way, least of all herself. There is an "I have to" about her playing. Most of all, there is that quality I want more than any other for myself and for every human: Immediate, continuous, courageous interaction with The Powerful Good.
This is the kind of experience that marries me to music over and over again. No other art form delivers it as readily; no other artist I've seen, as directly as Evelyn Glennie. If you ever have the opportunity to watch her perform, don't let it pass.
(This promotional video clip provides a glimpse: )
A recent article at the online Huffington Post contributed another point of view on the persistent question, "Who Cares About Classical Music?" You might find the writer's thoughts of interest, as we did here at WDAV. You can read the article here.
A colleague of mine is a highly sought consultant for radio stations of all types of formats. She believes the change in classical music's profile is at least partly due to what she sees as a well-documented shift in the last 50 years from a parental culture, which valued authority and institutions, to a peer culture, where everyone is an authority on his own desires and values. She doesn't think that's a bad thing, necessarily; it simply means you need to relate to people differently.
Another factor may be that our culture, in general, no longer distinguishes between high art and low art. The brilliant contemporary novelist Michael Chabon made this point in a recent interview. That's why, although he won a Pulitzer prize for one of his novels, he was also one of the screenwriters of Spider-Man 2.
There's been a fair amount of research done in the public radio industry into the "core values" of classical music listeners. This research has convinced me that listeners who seek out classical radio, in general, are in a sense actively rebelling against the predominant cultural aesthetic. They want to reconnect with a time when there were clearly defined standards of excellence and taste. Yet at the same time they can't help being part of the current culture, and in general expect to be treated as equals, not as pupils.
As you can probably tell, I think a lot about this kind of stuff. Probably too much, but it's something of an occupational hazard, and the articles and essays about classical music's imminent demise are frequent and inescapable.
That's why it would be interesting to hear your views. So, as always, you're invited to share.
I was aware of Beverly Sills before I knew anything about opera. As a child I watched her on my family's favorite TV program, The Carol Burnett Show. Occasionally I'd see her on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, the sound kept low on the set in my room to avoid disturbing my parents.
When I was a kid growing up in The Bronx, everything on TV might as well have been from another planet. The suburban home of The Brady Bunch and the Ponderosa homestead on Bonanza were both equally foreign.
But Beverly Sills looked and acted as if she could have been the mom of one of my classmates. She had a common touch that's sadly lacking in today's classical music scene, where every rising artist appears to be a prodigy from privileged circumstances.
An artist such as Beverly Sills made you feel that beauty and culture were within the reach of everyday people, and that you could attain them without forgetting who you were and where you came from.
Certainly a rare artist, and one who will be missed.
Acclaimed soprano Beverly Sills died at her home in Manhattan last night at age 78, and America lost the person whom many would argue was its most popular opera singer. Sills was a great advocate for the arts in this country not only popularizing opera through her celebrity but also working tirelessly as an effective arts administrator for the New York City Opera, Lincoln Center, and the Metropolitan Opera.
Read more about her life and important legacy in her New York Times obituary. And see her farewell performance when she was 51 below.