There won't be anything new going up on the blog this week, as we work to migrate the whole enterprise from Blogger to WordPress. There are a lot of reasons for the change, which we've been wanting to make for a while, and with the Inside the Classics concert season done for the spring, and the whole state thinking about spring break, now seemed to be a good time.
You probably won't see any changes to this page for several days, as we move our archives over to the new system and tweak things in the WP template. And even after the relaunch, which should happen by early next week, things may be a little rough on the front end, as we get used to the new system and prepare for a more wide-reaching redesign of the entire ItC site. But we'll get things sorted eventually, and the new blog should be a lot more visually pleasing and user-friendly in the end.
As always, thanks for reading, and we'll see you on the other side...
As everyone knows, times are tough for the newspaper industry. Most of their traditional revenue streams are drying up fast thanks to the online world's profit-confounding "information wants to be free" meme; their subscriber rolls are dropping sharply because a new generation of readers (myself included) doesn't see the point of having a paper version of stories we read online twelve hours earlier dropped on the front steps every morning; and corporate owners seem unwilling to sustain the high overhead costs of maintaining a massive newsroom staff if the huge profit margins the industry is used to continue to erode.
That having been said, it's somewhat remarkable that the Twin Cities have continued to sustain not one, but two major dailies. Yeah, go ahead and insert your own joke about the current quality of whichever paper you think is too thin, or too liberal, or too whatever, but the fact remains, we have two comparatively huge print newsrooms that continue to be the primary drivers of what gets reported on in Minnesota.
Not only that, both of our dailies continue to cover the arts, and specifically, classical music, at a time when far too many American papers have decided that the culture crowd just isn't big or spendy enough to be worth their time. Now, true, neither the Star Tribune nor the Pioneer Press employs a full-time classical music critic anymore - those positions were victims of seemingly endless budget cuts that reach into every corner of the newsroom, save sports - but it's notable that the arts editors at both papers have made a point of not missing many beats in actual coverage. Yes, they now use freelance writers to review our concerts, but both papers make a point of consistently using the same writers week to week, which from a reader's standpoint, is nearly the same as still having a full-time critic.
The upshot for us is that there is, on any given week, a diversity of opinion available on whether one of our concerts is worth the cost of a ticket. And that's not something to be taken lightly - I grew up in and around two big East Coast cities where a single critic and paper dominated the classical music scene, and too often, that critic's opinions were read as the final word on any issue.
That's a far cry from what a Minnesotan could read about our concerts this week: the Pioneer Press hailed our guest conductor as an exciting new talent, while the Star Tribune, reviewing the same concert on the same day, pretty much hated her. Which is the kind of thing that gets some musicians' (and concertgoers') blood boiling, but when you think about it, it's exactly what's supposed to happen with arts criticism. Musical taste is a highly personal thing, and on most weeks, you can find a wide diversity of opinion on the conductor's approach just within the orchestra, let alone in the audience, so why should critics be any different?
Any artist, musician, conductor, etc who chooses to take chances in front of an audience is running the risk that some people might not like the results. Even Osmo, coming off that string of incredible reviews in New York, ran into a critic with a stack of Eugene Ormandy recordings in his head last week, and got taken to task for (as nearly as I could make out) daring to take different tempos than Ormandy did. Personally, you couldn't pay me enough to play a Sibelius symphony the way Ormandy liked them, but that's just me.
And whether or not we like the stuff that gets written about our performances on a weekly basis, it's the sign of a vibrant and healthy arts scene when intelligent people can disagree on something as basic as whether a conductor was "a leader of charisma, confidence and imaginative interpretive ideas," or "seemed interested in achieving an almost metronomic precision; the result was dry and bloodless." I'll take impassioned debate over groupthink any day...
Yes, I tend to find the oddest things during my insomniac hotel moments on the road.
But more importantly, this kind of thing reminds me of the way we now interact with music, culture and each other. The original video is of Russian singer Eduard Khil from a TV show broadcast in 1976. His career had faded out by the 90's and he's been out of the public eye (and consciousness) for a while - until the video went viral. Interaction #1 - find interesting/humorous/kitschy music. Interaction #2 - make it widely available to your friends via social media (I first encountered this on Facebook).
And now, the above video - a reimagining of the original (I'm especially fond of the "Tonight...bye bye!" moment around 1:26). Interaction #3 - taking ownership and participating in (with) the art (artist).
One could take the "Kids these days..." or "Some people have too much time on their hands" point of view. Which I think is ill-advised. This is what people are doing online in their spare time. And, more to the point, this is how people interact with art - there is a desire to react and participate, which is, after all, the whole point of art. And a good point to be reminded of.
Sorry for the spotty blogging - it's been a busy month for me, finishing up our Inside the Classics concerts for the season, and I'm now in the midst of a two week span in 5 cities conducting 8 performances of 5 different programs (plus a recording!). It's enough to make the mind reel.
Now, there's a lot to be said about garnering rave review at Carnegie - and don't get me wrong, leaving a calling card like that in the musical capital of this country is a tremendous achievement (and I sure am proud of my home band).
But tonight, playing in the Vermont Statehouse, I was reminded that the heart of our work as musicians lies not in the accolades of big-city critics, but the delight and devotion of the people we serve.
By the time the doors opened at 6:45 pm for the 7:30 pm concert, hundreds of people were milling about in the entrance hall, and seats were filled long before the concert started. And after an hour of Grainger, Holst, Elgar and the lot, the entire audience stood in ovation. As I was leaving the building some minutes later, a family in classic Vermont wear (fleece pullovers and jeans) piled out of the door, thanking me for the concert.
I asked if they lived in Montpelier, and they said, no, they ran a small organic dairy near Danville, nearly 40 miles away. What a commute for a concert! I remarked. The father looked at me quizzically.
No, we don't think of it that way, he said. Music matters.
Okay, people, let's take a step back here. I'll be the first to admit that, when we play Carnegie Hall each season, I'm probably the first to run out and buy the Times two days later looking for the review. And when this year's rather unusual program struck a positive nerve with the New Yorkers, I think we were all thrilled. And this week's New Yorker article was certainly icing on the cake, coming as it did from one of the most respected voices in the classical music world.
But honestly? When we've reached the point that our local press is interviewing the New York press just to ask them to say one more time that the Big Apple thinks we're awesome, we might all want to take a deep breath.
Don't get me wrong - the fact that the media capital of the US is paying positive attention to our orchestra is a great thing, and I don't mean to make light of the pleasure anyone in Minnesota might be taking in that fact. (I can only imagine that our marketing staff is even now preparing to make copious use of the juicier quotes in next season's brochures, as well they should.) But when I heard Alex Ross talking to MPR's Tom Crann on All Things Consideredthis afternoon, the most important thing I heard him say was, "An orchestra is only as good as its last performance."
I'll be honest - good reviews can sometimes drive musicians battier than bad ones, just because of the pressure of living up to the hype the next night, next week, next month, etc. In fact, ever since that oh-so-flattering New Yorker piece came out, our rehearsals have been rife with gallows humor. Pretty much every audible mistake that's been made in rehearsal this week has been followed immediately by someone turning to the person next to him/her and intoning, with mock seriousness, "...greatest orchestra in the world."
Again, we're thrilled that we turned in a powerful show in New York, and grateful for the accolades, but we're back in Minneapolis now, with the home crowd that pays good money to hear us work our tails off week in and week out. Which means only one thing: Carnegie is over, and now, we're only as good as our next concert.
----------------------------
On another note, and in the name of gathering some perspective in this week of laudatory excess, the Minnesota Orchestra will actually have one more turn in the national spotlight tomorrow, when our beloved Associate Concertmaster Roger Frisch is featured on no less august a program than ABC's World News with Diane Sawyer. And this story has nothing to do with Carnegie Hall.
I'll let the ABC folks bring you the whole story, but suffice to say that Roger recently faced a terrifying and potentially career-ending medical crisis for which there appeared to be no solution, until the doctors at Minnesota's legendary Mayo Clinic stepped in and performed a miraculous and groundbreaking surgical feat. You know, the kind they seem to perform roughly every other week down there in Rochester.
Roger's story is scheduled to run during Thursday's World News broadcast, which airs locally at 5:30pm on KSTP-5. (For you out-of-town readers, that's 6:30pm E/P on your local ABC-TV affiliate.) I'll update this post with a link/embed to the online feed once it's posted.
Updated, 3/18: Okay, so they got the name of the orchestra wrong (honestly, ABC, you showed a close-up of the words "Minnesota Orchestra" seconds after your reporter called us something else,) but the shots of Roger playing the violin while a surgeon pokes sharp objects into his brain? Coolest thing ever. Here's the link to the online text version of the story (which also calls us the Minneapolis Orchestra,) and here's the video of the story as it aired tonight on ABC...
It's been relatively rare in recent seasons that the Minnesota Orchestra has welcomed an unfamiliar guest conductor. This is partly because Osmo has been conducting more concerts each season than most music directors of US orchestras, and partly because we tend to ask conductors we know and like (Gilbert Varga, Yan Pascal Tortelier, etc.) to come back year after year, so there aren't a great number of weeks available for new faces.
Still, it's always important to find places in the schedule to slot in conductors we haven't seen before, because you just never know when lightning will strike, and a conductor and an orchestra will click in a meaningful way. (Osmo was appointed music director after only one guest appearance with us, because the chemistry was just that immediate.) So it's refreshing that, over the next month, we'll be working under the batons no fewer than three conductors we know only by reputation.
The first of these is Xian Zhang, who has been building quite a career for herself since winning a major conducting prize in 2002. We had our first rehearsals with her today, and it's always interesting to jump into a week of major repertoire with a boss you've only just met. Our orchestra tends to be somewhat active, sometimes bordering on chaotic, during rehearsals with conductors we know well, but when a new face is on the podium, we quiet down and wait to see how s/he likes things to go.
Xian comes across as very serious and efficient at first blush, which you'd expect from a young conductor leading her first rehearsals with an unfamiliar orchestra. But as we made our way through the finale of Tchaikovsky's fifth symphony, I realized that we were likely about to test the depth of that ultra-serious facade. See, the last movement of Tchaik 5 has this moment where everything builds to a shattering climax, then stops dead before launching into the coda. But because of the huge pause after a loud (albeit dominant, not tonic) chord, audiences have a habit of assuming the piece is over and starting to applaud. So, being the immature twits we are, we have made a habit of clapping and cheering wildly at that same moment the first time we play it in rehearsal.
Naturally, we don't feel any need to warn conductors about this. We just do it, and see how they react. In fact, how they react often gives us a pretty good indication of whether this is a conductor who we're going to get along with. If they scowl, or ignore it entirely, or worst of all, fail to get the joke, we're probably not a great match.
When we got to the big moment today, Xian almost didn't notice at first, because after cutting off the huge B-major chord, she had already whirled around to start telling the first violins something about the previous passage. But as the cheering, clapping, and stomping drowned her out, she turned back towards us, dropped her guard, and flashed a wide grin. Three seconds later, she was back with the firsts, telling them how she wanted the runup to the climax phrased. Nice moment. I think we're gonna like working with this one...
OMG, you guys! It's finally happened: someone has invented a Fire Joe Morgan for classical music!!!
Okay, that was probably a very confusing opening paragraph for most of you. Let me explain. A few years back, some baseball fans who make their living as Hollywood screenwriters became so disgusted with the low intelligence level and writing skill of many so-called experts on the game that they launched a blog devoted to tearing down the suppositions of these experts, line by line. The blog's namesake was arguably the greatest second baseman of all time, and is inarguably one of the most consistently nonsensical and pigheaded baseball analysts working today.
Fire Joe Morgan should have been one of the bitterest, boring-est, most unreadable blogs in the universe. Instead, it was utterly hilarious, spawned countless imitators in the sports blogosphere, and turned its creators into the conquering folk heroes of the baseball stat-geek world. Were they mean? Yes. Unfairly nit-picky? Sometimes. But they were also right in almost everything they wrote, and their devoted readership included quite a few of baseball's more forward-thinking analysts.
Sadly, the authors shut the whole enterprise down some time ago, shortly after shedding their anonymity (no surprise that the hilariously cruel Ken Tremendous turned out to be one of the writers behind The Office,) but their fight against nonsense and bad writing stands as some of the most entertaining content on the web.
From the day I discovered FJM, I wished someone would start just such a blog for classical music. So much of what gets written about our industry in respectable publications falls somewhere between speculative and idiotic that it can be downright infuriating. When you read about musicians or actors who claim not to read reviews, it's usually not because they think they're above analysis. It's because a wrongheaded and badly written review makes you want to scream, and it's almost never worth actually screaming about, and there's nothing to be accomplished by the screaming.
There are, of course, plenty of blogs out there offering strong opinions on classical music, and many of them openly disagree with professional critics on a regular basis. But they're not funny. In fact, they're usually the opposite of funny, which is to say strident and preachy, and it was the funny that made FJM such an entertaining and readable site, rather than just another shrieking partisan voice in the online void.
As it turns out, though, not only is there a classical music version of FJM, it's apparently been around for more than two years now! (How it's taken me this long to notice it is beyond me, but I suppose I should be grateful that I didn't find it while Googling myself.) It's called The Detritus Review, it's written (if the FAQ is to be believed) by a couple of grad students majoring in music who've become disgusted with the quality of music writing in the mainstream press, and you guys, it. is. funny.
Please note that I didn't say that it's nice. Or respectful. It is neither of those, and I know some of you get upset when Sarah or I seem disrespectful of some corner of the music universe, so fair warning that The Detritus Review may not be your kind of site. (Also, those of you who object to profanity are going to want to stay far, far away.)
But if the piercing of pretentious balloons and wholesale teardown of conventional wisdom is your kind of thing, you'll love it. Personally, I'll be spending the next several weeks plowing through their considerable archive...
*Eduard Hanslick, as those of you who've been attending Inside the Classics concerts since the beginning will remember, was the German critic who declared Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto to be an unholy mess that "stank to the ear."
Okay, Thursday crowd, your turn to put in your two cents on this week's ItC concerts. We covered an awful lot of ground in the first half of the program, and also created a mashed-up, multi-composer performance for the second half, so tell us whether those elements worked for you, or just seemed overwhelming. (We're also always anxious for feedback on things like the lighting changes that we used to highlight the changing of seasons on the second half...)
If you're interested in reading and hearing more about all the music we featured in the concert, check out our extensive Cutting Room Floor post, which has everything we didn't have time to get into from the stage, including a brilliant performance of Piazzolla, and a video interview with composer Angel Lam.
As always, thanks so much for your continued support of this series. We set an all-time attendance record for the Casual Classics/Inside the Classics franchise this season, and exceeded every goal we set, thanks to all of you in the audience. We're making the big jump to weekends next season, reprising one of our most popular early ItC programs in November, and then featuring some of the greatest repertoire ever written for a symphony orchestra beginning in January 2011. So come on back, and we'll see you next fall!
If you were with us at Orchestra Hall on Wednesday evening, here's your chance to tell us what you thought of the concert. We covered an awful lot of ground in the first half of the program, and also created a mashed-up, multi-composer performance for the second half, so tell us whether those elements worked for you, or just seemed overwhelming. (We're also always anxious for feedback on things like the lighting changes that we used to highlight the changing of seasons on the second half...)
If you're interested in reading and hearing more about all the music we featured in the concert, check out our extensive Cutting Room Floor post, which has everything we didn't have time to get into from the stage, including a brilliant performance of Piazzolla, and a video interview with composer Angel Lam.
As always, thanks so much for your continued support of this series. We set an all-time attendance record for the Casual Classics/Inside the Classics franchise this season, and exceeded every goal we set, thanks to all of you in the audience. We're making the big jump to weekends next season, reprising one of our most popular early ItC programs in November, and then featuring some of the greatest repertoire ever written for a symphony orchestra beginning in January 2011. So come on back, and we'll see you next fall!
For those of you coming to our final Inside the Classics concerts of the season this week, here's the usual trove of links, tidbits, and general info that we won't have time to get into on stage. To begin with, we're playing a wider assortment of music on our first half than we ever have before on this series, so here's a playlist of everything heard during the show:
VIVALDI Summer, from The Four Seasons PIAZZOLLA Otono Porteno from The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires (arr. by Leonid Desyatnikov) RASKATOV January, February, March, and April from The Seasons' Digest VIVALDI Spring, from The Four Seasons MESSIAEN Oiseaux Exotiques RODRIGUEZ La Cumparsita (arr. by Sarah Hicks) PIAZZOLLA Oblivion HAYDN Introduction to Der Winter, from The Seasons TCHAIKOVSKY January from The Seasons LAM In Search of Seasons "February" by Dar Williams
-- For a concert based mainly around Vivaldi's Four Seasons, we're actually spending very little time talking about the composer known as the Red Priest. But he was a fascinating man, born into poverty in Venice, trained in the priesthood, and celebrated for bringing a distinctly Italian sensibility to concert music. (His use of stringed instruments in particular revolutionized orchestral music.) There's an excellent condensed biography of Vivaldi at BaroqueMusic.org, as well as the story of how his music, lost to historians for centuries, came to be rediscovered and popularized in the mid-20th century.
-- Both Vivaldi and Raskatov included poems in their scores to describe the feelings intended to be imparted by each movement. Vivaldi's sonnets, which he wrote himself, evoke each season directly, while Raskatov's poems, which he takes from various Russian authors including Tolstoy and Pushkin, focus on specific characters or events for each month of the year. There's no online translation available of Raskatov's poems, but here's a translation of the Pushkin poem he uses for January, At The Fireside:
The night is shrouded in a twilit glow, Silence reigns in the corner, The fire is low in the grate, The candle burns out.
To this, Raskatov adds, "It's terribly cold outside. An old clock strikes midnight." (Presumably, the hollow plunking sounds coming from the prepared piano in this movement of the piece represent the clanging of the clock.)
-- The March movement of the Raskatov contains a number of decidedly theatrical performance notes, including an indication that members of the violin section should "airbow," or pretend to play the notes on the page for several bars. This is the composer's way of bringing the idea of death and loss into the music. The poem he selected for this movement is about a lark, and Raskatov's notes call the setting "a sad thawing. An old lark, by some miracle still alive, welcomes the death of nature." As if to commemorate this passing, each violinist is asked to whisper the words "Requiem aeternam" (grant them rest) three times while holding the final note of the movement. So if you heard some whispering going on during the performance, that was it.
-- I first became aware of Raskatov's work when the violinist Gidon Kremer and his excellent ensemble, Kremerata Baltica, recorded The Seasons' Digest for a CD called The Russian Seasons, which is well worth a listen.
--Speaking of Gidon Kremer, he's an astoundingly great performer, and his version of Astor Piazzolla's The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, which was arranged specially for him (more on this below,) is truly awesome. Remarkably, the complete audio is available on YouTube, so here it is, season by season...
--The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires was originally written by Piazzolla for his quintet - bandoneon, piano, violin, electric guitar and electric bass. In 1991, Brazilian arranger/composer/conductor Jaques Morelenbaum arranged the work for woodwind quintet, three celli and double bass for an album. Neither the original nor this initial transcription contain any overt references to Vivaldi's Seasons, although the title pays homage to the idea. It was in 1999 that Russian composer/arranger Leonid Desyatnikov, working with Gidon Kremer, reworked Piazzolla's originals into the set (featuring solo violin) from which we've extracted "Autumn". Desyatnikov creates virtuoso character pieces out of Piazzolla's originals, adding cadenzas for the violin and occasionally inserting an overt reference to Vivaldi; in "Autumn", for instance, towards the end of the of the cadenza there is a brief quote from Vivaldi's "Spring" - a clever play on the fact that when it's spring in Italy, it's autumn in Argentina!
-- Finally, Angel Lam, the young alum of the Minnesota Orchestra's Composer Institute whose In Search of Seasons we're featuring towards the end of our first half, has a fantastic website of her own, stuffed with audio clips, biographical info, and other assorted goodies. She's definitely an artist on the rise, and I'm guessing this week won't be the last time our orchestra puts her music on a program. Here's an interview she did while she was with us last fall...
For reasons that remain unclear to me (but which almost certainly have to do with Blogger being ridiculously sucky at generating blogs,) we do not have a blogroll here at ItC Central. So when we discover a fabulous new music-related blog that we think all y'all should be reading, we pretty much have to dedicate a whole post to telling you about it.
Fortunately, I have no problem with that in this case. I've written before about my friend Kate Holzemer, a native Minnesotan who spends her days playing viola in the Buffalo Philharmonic, and her nights blogging hilariously about her beloved Buffalo Sabres. And now, with the Buffalo Phil preparing for a tour of the ever-lucrative state of Florida, the powers that be at the BPO have tapped Kate to apply her writing skills to their official tour blog.
Pretty much every orchestra that goes on any sort of tour these days puts up a blog, and to be brutally honest, most of them range from unreadably bland to offensively self-promotional. So I really can't recommend Kate's BPO blog highly enough, because I've known this woman for about 15 years now, and I can pretty much guarantee that she is the antithesis of bland and self-promotional. So far, she's referred to her viola as her unborn child, dubbed her stagehands SUPER-DUPER-MEGA-PROS, and called one of the BPO's percussionists a liar. And I'm assuming that's just her warm-up act.
The blog is at http://bporchestra.wordpress.com/, and you should all go there immediately. And then, you should forget how funny Kate is and come back here. Because honestly, we can't compete with that.
Sorry for the extremely light blogging this past week, but Sarah and I are scrambling to get this week's (exceedingly complicated) Inside the Classics concerts ready for prime time, and on top of that, I've spent the last seven days in five different cities, conducting various bits of orchestra business.
But I'm home now, and later this week, we'll be putting up our great big Cutting Room Floor post for this week's Four Seasons show, where you'll get all sorts of extra info and musical tidbits that we won't have room to get into on stage. (By the way, if you're free this Wednesday or Thursday and haven't bought tickets yet, by all means, do it - we've got a fun night planned, and our soloists, Gina DiBello and Jonathan Magness, are spectacular violinists besides.)
I'm still fighting the jet lag this morning, but to tide you over until I make it back to coherence, here's an article that popped up in one of Britain's leading dailies over the weekend, in which various luminaries of the English classical music scene opine on what they think ought to be done to make orchestras more accessible to a wider audience.
To be honest, a lot of the responses are pretty impractical (concerts in a fallout bunker? really?) or backward-looking (stop experimenting with all this new stuff and just play the warhorses,) but there are a few diamonds in the rough. Violinist Nicola Benedetti has some interesting things to say on the way we light concert halls, pianist James Rhodes sounds like he's gunning for my emcee job on Inside the Classics, and Gillian Moore of London's Southbank Centre tells an excellent story about some crusty musichead complaining that someone dared to insert dancers into a performance of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Which is a ballet.
I definitely tend to come down more on the side of those who believe that what some classical fans call "tradition" in the concert hall is actually a deliberate effort to make the uninitiated feel unwelcome and stupid, but at the same time, it drives me nuts when someone goes on and on about how we should give up our big fancy halls and just play our concerts at The Fine Line, because that's where the kids are. (As if the kids are primarily interested in the building and not the music they're hearing there.)
So what conceits of the concert hall would you dump in the name of making orchestras more welcoming to outsiders? Which would you cling to because to get rid of them would be to cheapen the experience? And if you're something of a concertgoing traditionalist, do you think those of us in this business are way too focused on the folks who never darken our doors, at the expense of those who loyally buy tickets season after season? Give us your two cents in the comments...
One of the great things about being a musician in the internet age is the constant two-way connection you can make with your audience. Where professional critics once stood alone in assessing the quality or relevance of a performance, now anyone with a keyboard and five minutes to set up a blog can have his/her say. There are downsides to this, as everyone knows, but in a relative niche market like classical music, the benefits far outweigh the annoyances.
On a related note, our orchestra has been in New York this week, where we played our annual Carnegie Hall concert on Monday night, pairing Michael Steinberg's arrangement of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge with Sibelius's monumental Kullervo. (And of course, a rousing encore of Finlandia for good measure.) To be honest, I wasn't sure what the New Yorkers would make of this program and the way we play it. These are two works in which Osmo demands a lot of very aggressive, even brutal playing, and while many people consider that kind of edge-of-your-seat music propulsive and exciting, those raised on the deliberate, contemplative style of conductors like Karajan or Maazel might sometimes find our approach jarring.
But so far, every word I've seen written about the Carnegie Hall concert has been a rave, and it's been fun, as always, to discover what new classical music blogs have popped up in New York since I last checked in. Here are some links to the write-ups I've found so far - I'll add more to this post as they pop up. (And yes, I'll include any negative reviews as well, but so far, there don't seem to be any, which is a nice feeling...)
Late Addendum, March 15: The estimable Alex Ross of The New Yorker has checked in with one of the best reviews our orchestra has ever received. Coming from Ross, who I respect like virtually no other writer working today, this means a great deal. The link is at the bottom of the list...
The New York Times: "Mr. Vanska has led the Minnesota Orchestra to impressive heights since becoming its music director in 2003, and the ensemble sounded fantastic on Monday. From the sweeping opening melody of the Introduction, the playing was detailed and intensely expressive, carrying the listener along..."
Musical America: "The truly awesome perfection of ensemble was jaw-dropping... To hear the five string bodies converse fortissimo with such unanimity and split-second force was jaw-dropping, but the pianissimos—a Vänskä speciality—arrested the listener’s attention no less. More than once I exclaimed to myself, 'My god!'"
ConcertoNet: "The real hero, though was Osmo Vänskä, a conductor who never shirks from “becoming” the dynamics he is conducting. A player told me his baton technique is faultless. But Mr. Vänskä’s essence is that his excitement–for the painfully enigmatic Beethoven and the instinctually emotive Sibelius–was expressively infectious."
Classics Today: "There's no denying the fact that Vänskä, a superb Beethoven conductor generally, has the Minnesota strings in top form. They tore into this awkward piece like a pack of happily unanimous demons."
The Classical Source: "Vänskä led a performance of the choral version of Sibelius's “Finlandia” that was breathtaking, concluding what was easily the finest concert I've heard so far this season."
The New Yorker: "It was the saddest, loveliest thing I have heard in a long time. For the duration of the evening of March 1st, the Minnesota Orchestra sounded, to my ears, like the greatest orchestra in the world."
The new 20 zloty note featuring bicentennial birthday boy and Poland's favorite son, Fryderyk Chopin.
Unfortunately for conductors, the only orchestra music Chopin wrote lies in the piano concertos, which, while containing little actual music for the orchestra, are notoriously difficult to coordinate with the soloist. Fortunately for pianists and music lovers everywhere, he left an remarkable legacy of piano music, particularly in large sets of miniatures (waltzes, etudes, preludes, mazurkas) - all featuring extraordinary harmonic complexity, melodic nuance and variety of mood.
For your enjoyment - famed Chopin interpreter Vladimir Horowitz playing a duo of Mazurkas, including one of my favorite (the modal-sounding A minor one):
For more information on Chopin festivities click here.
