oboeinsight

The Music Business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long
plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die
like dogs. There’s also a negative side.
-Hunter S. Thompson
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The season is over. Now it’s on to Les Mis for me.
… and we weren’t together much of the concert, so perhaps last night was the same, and and I just wasn’t noticing because I was so busy working. (Trust me, this can happen! Sometimes I’m just too self involved!)
Anyway, I do know one [...]

So some folks think they know who the “Piano Man” is. Read here and see what’s up now.
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We had a symphony concert tonight. Ahhhh, Brahms! I just love his music. It just wraps around me. Incredible stuff.
I heard tell that the orchestra didn’t sound as together as we have in the past. I’ll be curious to read the reviews, although, of course, the reviewers aren’t necessarily perfect, so who knows what [...]

So … need a conductor? Try ebay.
Really.
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… Symphony Silicon Valley will be giving our last concert of the season. We are playing Rossini’s Overture to Barber of Seville, Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and Brahms’ Symphony No. 2.
Ahhhh, the Brahms! What wonderful music. There are times when I just want to stop playing and listen. I want to melt. It really [...]

Opera is for giving you goose bumps, for making the hair stand up on the back of your neck, for making you cry.
-Dr. Barbara Baker
(I located Dr. Baker’s blog via Prima la musica, poi le parole: opera blog. Good find, Plm!)
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thinks I’m all wrong. He may well be right.
It’s very rare for me to say that I know I’m right. I’m willing to hear others out. And I may just be too dense to “get” all the subtleties of the opera.
I’m also willing to listen to the opera again.) I’ve been known to change [...]

The opera is over. If you click on the link below you’ll be hearing who knows what! :-)
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I’m listening to a broadcast of Lorin Maazel’s “1984″. (Online. BBC 3. Isn’t the internet cool? Just go here.) “1984″ quickly became a greatly panned opera. The conductor turned composer, it has been said, put a good amount of his own money behind this performance. (Opera San Jose did that once, performing “Ode to Phaedra” [...]

I had mentioned a while back that I had a tooth that was reacting to cold. Nina, of A Sort of Notebook fame, suggested it was a cracked tooth. I suspected she was correct, but I didn’t make an appointment since I knew I was going in in about a month anyway. (Well, okay, I [...]

I sure do! So yay for the musicians of the American Ballet Theatre.

NEW YORK May 23, 2005 ˘ American Ballet Theatre and its musicians union announced a new contract deal Monday that the union said requires the ballet to use only live musicians and bans so-called virtual orchestras.
ABT Executive Director Rachel Moore said the tentative [...]

… and worth the read!
Drew McManus has done it again. For me, anyway. There’s a great post written by a man who took himself to an orchestra concert.
My Favorite Snippet:

There was just something about it that caught me up. I sat up and held my breath and looked around and wondered if anyone [...]

I’ve been following this story (or read this) as various reports come in. My initial response, skeptic that I am, was to consider it a hoax. Reading here I immediately went “Uh-huh, there you go! I knew it!” (I’m not a very trusting person, am I?)
However this article suggests that the those who are watching [...]

… is “Buy A Musical Instrument Day”.
Sure. Why not?
Buy two if you’d like. Make one an oboe and give it to me if you will!
I’ve yet to see “Make An Oboe Reed Day”. Surprising, isn’t it? But then, every day should be Make An Oboe Reed Day. Right?
Right.
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It always irks me when classical music is used to rid an area of kids. First of all, who’s to say that the loiterers might not like Mozart anyway? (Read this to see what I’m talking about.) And why do we want to imply that Mozart is guaranteed to drive kids away anyway? This says [...]

Sometimes he commented on our tempos. We’d say that we were only following his own metronome marks, and his reply was, ‘My metronome at home is broken. Don’t pay any attention to my metronome marks.’
-Valentin Baerlinksy, cellist of the Borodin Quartet, talking about Shostakovich (Article may be found here).
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If you visit this blog you can follow the Philadelphia Orchestra’s tour of Asia as a number of participants will be blogging. (I wish they’d provided bios of all the bloggers, but oh well!)
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From this:

I have a terrible confession to make. For many years I was a person who often would put on instrumental music as I read, did laundry or did some sort of work. I could never use vocal music, singer that I am I could never concentrate with it on, but orchestral or piano [...]

Are you scratching your head now? About the subject header, I mean?
Figures.
Anyway, I sometimes read Paul Cantrell’s Comparing Notes and the subject of his recent blog is Reviewing the Review so maybe you can see where I’m coming from.
If not don’t worry; we all have our moments.
The little “teaser”, on his main page, prior to [...]

I am far superior to you, but my well-known modesty forbids me to say so.
-Eric Satie
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I will write this here, and I will write it at my other site:
I can’t read sites that have white type on black background!
Really.
It hurts my eyes. For the next few minutes I’m nearly blinded.
There are a few sites I really enjoy reading, but the old eyes are saying “No more!” and I have to [...]

Drew McManus of Adaptistration is featured on an interview on WNYC after taking a friend to hear a Bartok concert with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. It’s really worth a listen!
Go to the link and then click on “listen to the whole show”. Really.
One thing (a “Big Duh”) I hadn’t thought to recommend before, [...]

over at Arts Journal?
Well, maybe not TOO bad, but I found several typos and I thought I’d share with you:

Tecahers
irf
vilinist

WHY do I share with you?
Becaws I kan.
I really do like artsjournal.com, and I’m only kidding around. It’s Monday. I have no rehearsals. I have to do SOMETHING, right?
It is more fun than doing something [...]

… because you are dying to know … right?
Blouse: black background, turquoise and spring green leaf-type (fronds?) pattern that looked appropriately Island-ish.
Pants: black
Shoes: black
Socks: black
So there you go. You can say “no black” but I can’t DO “no black”! :-)
What I also noticed was that probably about 50% of the group had black somewhere in [...]