Mostly introductory articles to series or Tuesday posts as prefaces to Thursday works.
I recently attended a concert with this exact theme, and had to ask myself if perhaps it was part of the reason I had the idea for what we’ll be doing for the next five weeks or so. I’m not going … Continue reading January: Cello and Symphony
And here we are again at the end of another month of marvelous music. I feel like if I could get around to doing more of these series for more individual nations/cultures, there would be so many gems to discover. … Continue reading Danish December: wrap-up
Danish music! I’ll try not to make any comparisons, but I was just stunned by the volume and quality of Swedish music over the summer, preparing for September’s Swedish Symphony Series (awesome alliteration!), and this month, we’re doing Danish. There … Continue reading Danish December: a series
Well, that was fun. In most cases, I end up preparing/presenting a month or so of posts as a program, building around an idea or connecting things by some underlying concept. But not this month. Also, drop down below to the … Continue reading New November wrap-up (and soapbox)
Last month marked three years that I’ve been writing in this space (the past year powered by WordPress, and previous years by other, inferior platforms), and that’s totaled more than 600 articles, more than half of which are ‘music posts’ or articles about … Continue reading New November: a series
Yes, yes, yes, it’s only a smattering. My apologies to: Mosolov Ustvolskaya Anatoly Lyadov Lyapunov A. Tcherepnin Myaskovsky Kabalevsky Gubaidulina Catoire And more. As you may have seen, we spent significant time in the first decade of the 20th century, … Continue reading Russian Piano in review
featuring Mike McCaffrey. Listen here or in iTunes. This episode comes at a pretty cool time that I hadn’t planned. I’d planned for it to be uploaded this week (pretty low-fi operation here, so it depends largely on my spare … Continue reading Podcast: Haydn Seek, pt. 2
Is there any other? with Taiwan’s National Symphony Orchestra (國家交響樂團) under Maestro Shao-Chia Lü (呂紹嘉), stage director Carlus Padrissa, a co-production of Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia and Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, with full credits shown below This performance on … Continue reading Wagner’s Das Rheingold
It has been a good long while since we’ve done any piano stuff, but it’s actually been longer since last year’s Russian Symphony 2015 series that lasted three whole months. Granted, in those three months, we covered 20 symphonies, but at … Continue reading Russian Piano 2016: a series
So much Swedish music! There were a few challenges in preparing this series. At the beginning, as I said in the introduction, there were a few names that were responsible for deciding to do this series to begin with. I’d … Continue reading The Swedish Series: a wrap-up
30th Anniversary Season Opener, featuring Leonidas Kavakos Well, I’m a bit late in coming with this. The concert was almost a week ago, and came at the end of an extremely long day (and weekend, involving a national holiday, two typhoons, a … Continue reading NSO’s A Hero’s Life
It was almost six months ago to the day that I first knew that the Quatuor Diotima would be visiting Taiwan, and that was the same week I posted an article I spent a lot of time preparing for, only to share … Continue reading Quatuor Diotima in Taipei
(for all the posts that were in this series, click here) This one has been brewing for some time. So many series… but I feel like it’s a good way to organize works into a little package, a timeline that … Continue reading September’s Swedish Symphony Series 2016
featuring Yun Peng Zhao from Quatuor Diotima. Listen here or in iTunes, or an abridged Chinese version here But when you listen to the twentieth century, maybe just give up this habit, for example, nice melody. For example, some drama… maybe … Continue reading Podcast: Livre pour Quatuor Diotima
Dear Orchestra I Was Looking Forward To Seeing This Year, (and also Famous Pianist I Don’t Really Know) I’m flattered, but also a little annoyed. In most cases, we are very glad to have your type come through. Living in … Continue reading You and Your Programming: an open letter
There isn’t much to say, maybe, about August’s line-up. There was quite a variety of influences peppered throughout the four composers featured this month, from Ravel’s earliest work and influence from Debussy to his later fascination with jazz and then … Continue reading Various Violin Virtuosity: A wrap-up
A living composer! I had deliberated on whether to write this article and how to go about it. The works of Glass’s we’re going to be discussing aren’t necessarily the best place to start for this composer to get to know him and his … Continue reading Influential People: Philip Glass
If you’ve read this blog for any length of time (as in, any more than about twice), you’ll know I’m a sucker for a good series. I try to approach things in an organized, logical manner, so I like to … Continue reading Various Violin Virtuosity
Needless to repeat, but I shall, that none of my series are comprehensive; there’s no way they can be. The blog as an entire entity is not comprehensive. But I think in this challenging and intense month of listening and writing (the … Continue reading Darmstadt 2016: A Review
It’s July. Do you remember what we did last July? Go have a look. It seemed like a cool thing at the time to dedicate July to an interesting program of stuff, and last year’s month-long piano series was originally … Continue reading Series: The Darmstadt School
I used to have ‘thoughts’ articles a lot more often than I do now. Concert reviews would be every Tuesday, but now they’re the evening of (or a day or two after) the concert, and I’m taking on too much … Continue reading Wrap-up to a Series?
Fugue for Thought 