February 2010
1 post
Bye Bye
Bye bye Tumblr. I’m heading home.
Visit the blog at it’s new address:
http://profpam.com/twinklefingers
4 tags
Watching Aida at the Met
After what I thought was a rather dull start, the Met’s production of Aida has come to life. Violeta Urmana is doing a splendid job. The sets are great, the orchestra sounds a bit anemic. Other broadcasts have had a much crisper sound.
The triumphal entry was indeed triumphal. Glad the horses didn’t poop on the stage. With a cast of a hundred, easy. The baritone playing Aida’s...
January 2010
8 posts
The Audition
Watching “The Audition” on Great Performances on PBS. Why? I haven’t a clue, really. I hated auditions. I’m grateful that I didn’t pursue solo music performance.
There’s a lot riding on these National Council auditions: there’s the money but the prestige of having made it thus far (the bunch being profiled have already made it to the semifinals).This is...
4 tags
Patricia Racette and Il Trittico
Great interview. She did Il Trittico in San Francisco and now at the Met. I haven’t had the chance to hear her live. But that’s on my list for 2010 if she comes back to the Bay Area. She could easily become one of my favs. I’ve tried and tried to become a fan of Renée Fleming and I just can’t seem to get past the “cover” in her voice, if that’s the right...
3 tags
Lydian modalities and jazz
George Russell’s The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization for Improvisation. Quite a mouthful. I got a copy through interlibrary loan. I puzzled over it for a week and sent it back. My Dad promises to walk me through it. More on my saga after I receive the book again.
Moans from a liturgical purist
I’m a liturgical purist. This means that I forbid the playing of “Joy to the World” during Advent. It’s just so wrong. I won’t go so far as to say that it is a sin, but it’s pretty high up on the list.
Well, I was boppin’ along to Anita O’Day on last.fm, when suddenly Diane Schuur, whom I adore, comes on. Tune: The Christmas Song. Now it’s...
4 tags
Consuela Lee, jazz educator died
I realize there is a lot of death notices these days. I don’t mean for it to be a “downer”. I post these notices, especially this one, because of the importance of learning about these musicians. I never knew about Consuela Lee. She sounds as though she did a lot of good promoting music education, broadly, and jazz education, specifically.
Consuela Lee, a jazz pianist who...
Teddy Pendergrass died
Pendergrass certainly fought valiantly since that horrific car accident in 1982.
R&B singer Teddy Pendergrass, who was one of the most electric and successful figures in music until a car crash 28 years ago left him in a wheelchair, has died of colon cancer. He was 59.
Rest in peace.
Billy Holiday sound alike
I’m not a huge Billy Holiday fan. She was singing “Careless Love” is an okay song. But I wasn’t in the mood to listen to Holiday do a cover of a Country and Western song.
As I was about to log out of Last.fm what did I discover? It was Madeleine Peyroux.
December 2009
2 posts
Ode to (upside down) Joy
From the year end art in review from the New York Times.
Mr. Zmijewski is one of several contemporary artists to make resonant solo appearances. Who could forget the young musicians playing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” from the cutout center of moving pianos in an installation by the artist team of Allora & Calzadilla at Gladstone?
November 2009
23 posts
Tomasz Stanko
Who is he? Michael Connelly mentions him in his novel Nine Dragons (p. 100).
Tomasz Stańko was a Polish trumpeter who sounded like the ghost of Miles Davis.
Godowsky Chopin Etudes
Where has this man been all my life?
A mostly new find for me. And I’m lovin’ it. I say “partial” because I have, in fact, played a Godowsky arrangement: his arrangement of Sinding’s Rustle of Spring. It was one of my grandmother’s favorites and mine, too. Fun to play.
But these Chopin Etudes by Leopold Godowsky are off the hook. Grab the 2-CD set from the...
Ella rediscovered
[Yale Joel/Life Magazine/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images]
A new discovery. And not bootlegs. Verve has just release a four CD set entitled “Twelve Nights in Hollywood”. Ella Fitzgerald at her prime singing 76 songs at a small club in Los Angeles, the Crescendo in 1961 and ‘62.
Real recordings never before released. As Fred Kaplan remarks in this NY Times review, “[t]here’s...
A return to the big band
Bringing back the Big Band era one lead sheet at a time! This looks like great fun. I often say I was born in the wrong era. I would have loved to have been a young adult in this era, 1920-1940’s. (Yes, I know. It’s a romantic version of that era that I love. Actually living in that period probably wouldn’t have been much fun.) Hats off to Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks. Take...
Listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir
Oliveto has a much more mature attitude than I do. Yes, it is an amazing choir, but I just can’t bring myself to listen to it. At least I’m as consistent as I know how to be. I wish there was a Snopes.com for music and musicians. I won’t even tiptoe into the Wagner quicksand (Listen to it or not? Perform it or not?). I remember when I read that von Karajan was a Nazi sympathizer....
Lou Harrison and the Muse
I discovered this delightful site a few weeks ago. I’ve yet to plumb all the archives, but I’m sure they’re filled with tasty treats such as this one. I was at San Jose State University when Lou Harrison was there. I’ll never forget the advice he gave me after he examined my composition for my first Composition Jury (probably 1977): “Never miss your appointment with...
Armstrong and the Jewish connection
This article, “Satchmo and the Jews”, by Terry Teachout, is well worth reading. I’d known about Satchmo’s “univeralism”, if I can put it that way. So his close friendships across racial and religious lines is nothing new. What’s new is the back story and the details that Teachout fills in for us. Add some more to the “To Read” list:...
Brendel the brainiac
Poor, one-dimensional me. Who knew? Great pianist, sure. But now I’ve got to track down Alfred Brendel’s essays and poetry. Too intriguing to let this slip by.
This from the Times Online October, 2009:
To describe Brendel as an intellectual is rather like describing Leonardo da Vinci as a good all-rounder. Honoured last week with the award of one of the world’s top cultural...
Jay-Z and Foreign Policy?
I’m reading it, but I’m not believing it. An article on the rapper Jay-Z appeared Foreign Policy online mag: Jay-Z vs the Game: Lessons for the American Primacy Debate.
Opera in movie theaters
Opera in movie theaters? I do want to give it a try. Live or taped. It wouldn’t matter to me. Too bad all the Met HD shows aren’t free.
Britten B&B
Book a room in Britten’s childhood home.
ht/Bob Shingleton via Alex Ross
Haydn bookfest
The Financial Times review books on Haydn. Who knew? The 200th anniversary of Haydn’s death gets a gaggle of books. I’m not a Haydn fan. (The only concert in which I ever fell asleep was during a Haydn Symphony. Does it really matter which one?) But this little tidbit is interesting:
Without those “London” symphonies and the late, quasi-orchestral string quartets, not to mention the...
Ambiguity award
From Gramophone Award’s Issue (2009), p. 123:
This is Mengelberg’s broadest Pathétique, a truly tragic performance.
Music in Philosophy Hall
Oh that we (the Philosophy Department at San Francisco State) could have such a “drawing room”. Sigh. Lovely new Steinway on the left and probably another one that Hochman played. I love that dear, little B-flat Partita of Bach’s. Still working on it after all these years.
The premise of Columbia University’s free Lunchtime Concerts, presented at Philosophy Hall, an intimate...
The political life of Leonard Bernstein
A review of Barry Seldes’ Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician .
What Seldes must prove, rather, is that Bernstein’s politics should matter to us. For if Bernstein was known as a famous liberal, he is also widely remembered as a fatuous one.
I was not of voting age when most of the political events happened that are detailed in this book. I’ve also got a...
Dudamel watch
The hype! The hair! The “dude”!
Along the way the orchestra established a breathless minisite devoted to Mr. Dudamel on its Web site, laphil.com. It features a Bravo Gustavo computer game akin to Guitar Hero and an application that allows the movement of an iPhone to shape music coming out of it. A famous hot-dog stand, Pink’s, put up a banner welcoming him and created a Dudamel Dog...
More White House music
I missed news of this earlier in November. What I want to know is: When are the Obama girls are going to start music lessons?
Wednesday was classical music day at the White House. The festivities and performances were sponsored by the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, created by executive order in 1982. The first lady serves as honorary chairwoman of the committee, and...
The Met gets a gift from aborad
Wow! $7.5 million. What a gift.
Mona Webster, a lighthouse keeper’s daughter who lived in Edinburgh and died in August at 96, had a love of birds, and warblers in particular — of the human kind. She demonstrated that affection by leaving most of her fortune to the Metropolitan Opera and a nature charity in Britain.
MTT and Shostakovich
As much as we may make him out to be, Michael Tilson Thomas isn’t the next Leonard Bernstein. My guess is that MTT doesn’t want to be Bernstein despite the mentoring MTT received from Bernstein. That said, I was very impressed with MTT’s channeling of Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts with his series Keeping Score.
The episode I saw was the one on...
Gramophone Awards Issue 2009
It’s been decades (literally!) since I purchased a copy of Gramophone. The Awards Issue was enticing, though. I must say that I’m enjoying this issue immensely. I have this weird habit of reading magazines from the back to the front. Yes, I read the blizzard of ads at the back. (I’ve already admitted that it’s a weird habit.)
On p. 129 there’s an essential download...
A maestro mano a mano
I heard (probably on NPR) a profile about the new music director of the LA Philharmonic, Gustavo Dudamel. An amazing story. It makes it clear how poverty stricken our arts education is.
This LA Times article compares Dudamel and Alan Gilbert, the new music director of the NY Philharmonic. (I’m way behind the curve here: I have no idea who Gilbert is.)
October 2009
1 post
September 2009
2 posts
The soprano's curse
Seed magazine thank you! I’ve wondered about this for decades. Yes, I’ve been too lazy to research it. Frankly, I used to hate working with sopranos, i.e., composing music for them to sing. Why? Because you either get the sound you want or you can understand the words. You can’t have both. So why bother. Only a fantastic soprano can do both. But even they fail more often than...
Music and feelings
Mark Changizi has an article in this month’s Scientific American, a line of thought that John Cage would appreciate. Is music simply another form of language?
Speech sounds alone, stripped of their meaning, don’t inspire. We don’t wake up to alarm clocks blaring German speech. We don’t drive to work listening to native spoken Eskimo, and then switch it to the Bushmen Click station during...
August 2009
2 posts
Black Eyed Peas concert: Muslims not allowed
From the NY Times:
The government in Malaysia has forbidden Muslims to attend a concert that the Black Eyed Peas will play there next month — not because of provocative lyrics or revealing costumes, but because the performance is sponsored by Guinness, The Associated Press reported. The official Web site for the show, which is being held on Sept. 25 near Kuala Lumpur to celebrate the 250th...
Les Paul
I had no personal relationship with Les Paul.
That may sound a bit odd. With such pioneers or “old school” American music All Stars team, who would expect a Baby Boomer to have met or known Les Paul.
Well, I did meet and have an exchange with Tex Beneke. Yes, that one. The Chattanooga Choo Choo, sax guy from Glenn Miller. So there!
But Les Paul I only knew from reading about him and...
June 2009
18 posts
Who will write a requiem for the dead in Iran?
Someday, unfortunately maybe not too soon, people will compose requiems for those killed in Iran. If Wynton can win a Pulitzer for Blood on the Fields, surely someone ought to be recognized for treating this horrific event through music. Sad. Sad.
Yes, it is sad. But I find it powerfully cathartic listening to the Brahms’ Requiem, for instance, or the poignant Faure Requiem. It’s an...
Internet radio
I’m sure there are lots of these sites now. There’s blip.fm and last.fm. I’ve spent more time on the latter. My latest station is a Charlie Parker one.
Auferstehn, ja auferstehn wirst du
werd’ ich entschweben zum Licht, zu dem kein Aug’ gedrungen! Sterben werd’ ich, um zu leben! Auferstehn, ja auferstehn wirst du, mein Herz, in einem Nu! Was du geshlagen, zu Gott wird es dich tragen!
I shall soar aloft to that light which no mortal eye has penetrated. I shall die, so that I may live again! You will rise again, yes rise again, my heart, in a trice. Your beating ...
The Rev. Michael Rollie Jones
It must be around the anniversary of Rollie’s death. I admit to that much of a superstitious streak. Why else the convergence of so many things? I haven’t listened to Mahler’s #2 in years. It was only at the fourth movement that memories of Rollie and his fondness for this symphony came flooding over me.
Rollie was my spiritual director and a wonderful friend. A wise counselor, scholar, and...
Listening to Mahler's Symphony #2 Resurrection
I checked this out from the San Jose Public Library (Cambrian Branch) last week and thought tonight would a nice time to listen and burn the CD.
Bopped over to Amazon and discovered that this London recording is no longer available. Though I’m glad to report that it received very high customer marks. So far this library copy hasn’t had any annoying scratches.
Tony Duggan has done a...
Dancin' in the street
Hate their coffee. Love their music. A Starbucks find this afternoon. Martha Reeves, Marvin Gaye, Gladys Knight, the Four Tops, Stevie Wonder. Great songs. Wonderful music to listen to while walking.
Francesca Zambello
Who? I enjoy opera, but I’m not an opera buff. I’m certainly not up on the opera directors. I’ve just learned about this extraordinary director. Francesca Zambello is one of the few women directors in the opera world.
This link is to a short “outtake” of a documentary on her. The entire documentary is here. (The link may prompt you to open up iTunes).
A high priest of music
A very nice review of Murray Perahia, one of my favorite pianists.
To hear the pianist Murray Perahia in recital is to commune with one of music’s high priests. So audiences typically savor his legendary concentration and unassailable technique in hushed form — granting him a degree of respect not always afforded other, equally famous, artists.
High praise indeed. I’ve never seen Perahia in...