To a student today: Don’t do backflips with your oboe.
Yeah. I really said that. I’m witty that way. (He had told me he had a sore back from doing backflips.)
A new study found that elderly patients who listened to a 12-minute Mozart sonata three times a week significantly lowered their blood pressure and heart rate. If Mozart isn’t on your hit parade, don’t worry: You can get even better results by listening to a CD with the sounds of ocean waves, researchers found. The Mozart and ocean-sounds listeners reduced their blood pressure by about 5 percent.
So if you have low BP could you commit suicide by listening to too much Mozart or taking a holiday at the sea? Huh? Huh? ;-)
I read it here.
Kurt Weill’s Street Scene is a Broadway musical or, more precisely, an American opera, about working-class life in New York City in 1947.
Well, okay then.
Dan and I took a trip to SoCal to visit our daughter and son-in-law, which is why this weekend wasn’t a bloggy one for me. We arrived home last night, and I’m guessing it’ll take me some time to recover from the drive, but I’m back.
But maybe you didn’t even know I was gone?
Since signing a deal with Simon Cowell, Escala have had a radical makeover
But Escala, the glamorous string quartet who were finalists on the ITV show Britain’s Got Talent, have cancelled the launch of their debut album, after admitting that the record was not good enough to release.
The band, whom Cowell described as having “star potential”, signed a multi-million pound deal with his SyCo record label earlier this year after finishing fifth in the television talent competition, for which Cowell was a judge.
But Escala have proven controversial with the classical establishment, some of whom have accused the band of “dumbing down” classical music and “patronising” their audience to sell more records.
Since signing a deal with Cowell, Escala – violinists Victoria Lyon, 25 and Izzy Johnston, 24; Chantal Leverton, a viola player, 25; and Tasya Hodges, 26, a cellist – have been the subject of a radical makeover.
Their website features the band posing in low-cut red dresses and heavy make-up without any of their instruments, while they also appear in Sky Sports television advertisements for the Premiership football season, playing their instruments wearing minidresses and stiletto heels. Their first video, a rendition of Karl Jenkins’s Palladio performed by the band on a beach in short sequinned dresses, has received more than 640,000 hits on the video website YouTube.
The last-minute decision not to release their album in time for the lucrative Christmas market will be a blow to Cowell, who hoped that Escala would emulate the success of his other classical act, Il Divo, whose pop ballads sung in a “classical style” have sold more than 22 million albums.
(Complete article here.)
I had blogged earlier about this group. (And even before that, but I’m too lazy to find the link). Looks like they want whatever they put out to be “good enough”.
Sunday I will be taking a quiet day.
After all … how can you miss me if I won’t go away? ;-)
Sometimes reviewers write pretty odd stuff. Sometimes I just scratch my head. But still, they can be very entertaining.
Make absolutely no mistake about it, when the Acadiana Symphony Orchestra is hot, you can fry an egg on a trombone. From the first note, their latest concert proved to redefine musical excellence and coincidentally cause the Heymann’s thermostats to tremble.
… and
Since the audience was so enthusiastic in their appreciation, Maestro Smolij was unable to point out the superior solo work of a pair of his musicians, oboist Perry Trosclair and horn maestro Rod Lauderdale. Their work certainly added to the performance’s luster. Oh, and by the way, thanks for the “A,” Perry.
I found these here.
Perhaps I’ll write a real blog entry later. We’ll see. I’m a bit on the busy side today and tomorrow!
Of course I love the opera, but I also love making fun of it. For example, in Verdi’s “La Traviata,” the heroine Violetta is supposed to die of tuberculosis, but she is usually played by overweight singers like me so I always imagined that she was really suffering from diabetes. These kinds of thoughts just crack me up. I just can’t help it. I don’t know how the audience can watch us without laughing
-Kumiko Mori
I read it here.
The realities of popular music culture and jazz are you can rely on individual expression to achieve things — the technical mastery doesn’t matter so much. But classical music requires both. The analogy I like to use is the difference between an actor in a sitcom and an actor in the theater. In a sitcom, pretty much the job is just to be funny, and most actors generally can be funny. But to be in a play by a Tom Stoppard or an Arthur Miller, you have to develop a character that is convincing.
-Branford Marsalis
Read more here.
In a preemptive strike to keep audiences from trading an evening of theater for TV and a frozen pizza during troubled economic times, Center Theatre Group is announcing a new “Entertainment Stimulus Package” that will make available 100,000 tickets at $20, available for all performances at all three of its theaters –the Ahmanson, Mark Taper Forum and Kirk Douglas — for the entire 2008-09 season.
I much prefer this to comps. Free tickets don’t work. People take them — what’s the harm in taking free tickets?! But they feel no obligation to show up.
I also think handing out free tickets gives the recipient the idea that what he or she is about it attend is really of little or no value. Giving them a nice discount doesn’t come across quite that way.
Some will suggest that giving out comps encourages the recipients to purchase tickets the next time around. In all my years of handing out comps I don’t believe I’ve ever heard someone say, “Next time I’m gonna buy some tickets! That was great!” However I’ve frequently heard, “Thanks, and let me know when you can get some more comps!”
Just my thoughts on the matter. And that is all.
Years ago my closest friend, Mark Leffler, was at a San Francisco symphony. Throughout one piece of music he sat mesmerized to the building intensity, louder and louder until his own energy could barely be contained. Finally, with Mark on the edge of his seat, the music came to an abrupt end and Mark exploded upward applauding and cheering in un-symphony like character. But the piece of music was only pausing and every eye, conductor’s included, turned to Mark, who found himself standing amongst hundreds of black ties cheering as if he were at a hockey game. He later admitted however that it is moments like this that we must live for, to give in to our emotions and just express how we feel.
I found the above here, a blog by some “mountain sports photographers”. Check ‘em out. :-)
You can get free downloads from The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Cool eh? Check it out!
Alex Trebek doesn’t know what a theremin is. Geesh.
And I thought he knew everything.
“Crescendo doesn’t mean you should speed up those running 8th notes in the second movement, dear oboist.”
And no, I won’t tell you which recording I’m listening to, but certainly the player should have known better. And yet I’m hearing this in a several recordings. Hmmm. Maybe my part is missing an accelerando?
The composer has here attempted to present the characteristics of the various instruments. Now they seem to interrupt one another and now they sound alone. The theme for these variations is the tune of one of Carl Nielsen’s spiritual songs, which is here made the basis of a number of variations, now gay and grotesque, now elegiac and solemn, ending with the theme itself, simply and gently expressed.
-Carl Nielsen
