Miscellaeneous Musings: the NY Phil, Howard Theatre, WYPR, No Depression, Pete Seeger…

Any resemblance to Mike “I Was Just Thinking….” Barnicle is purely coincidental….

Kind of amazing to hear the wall-to-wall media coverage of the New York Philharmonic’s trip to North Korea….startling and gratifying to hear snippets of the New World Symphony in the middle of network newscasts. Worth reading:  Anne Midgette’s column in the WaPo on this [...]

Read Full Post »

Concert Previews for Winter/Spring 2008

Some of the most fun I have is doing a number of Concert Preview conversations for the subscribers to the Washington Performing Arts Society and other performing-arts organizations in the D.C. area. Here’s what I’ve got on tap so far for the Winter/Spring of 2008:
Sunday, February 3, 3:00 pm Kennedy [...]

Read Full Post »

Concert Previews: Fall 2007

Here’s a look at some of the Concert Previews (e.g., pre-concert lectures) I’ll be giving for subscribers to the concert season of the Washington Performing Arts Society:
Wednesday, October 10, 8:00 pm The Music Center at Strathmore
La Scala PhilharmonicRiccardo Chailly, conductorThe long-awaited D.C.-area debut of the La Scala Philharmonic, led by the charismatic Riccardo Chailly, [...]

Read Full Post »

Fireworks on the Radio – A Capitol Fourth

One of my summertime rituals during my days at the downtown network was to produce the radio version of A Capitol Fourth, the annual music, dance, and fireworks extravaganza originating from the West Lawn of the Capitol building and broadcast around the world. And, in truth, it was an event I produced with [...]

Read Full Post »

Pas De Dirt

Now THIS is a story that made me smile – and I wish I’d seen it! Forget street theatre – how about street ballet? From the mind of Genius grantee Liz Lerman and her Dance Exchange, collaborating with Bowen McCauley Dance comes Pas De Dirt, an “industrial dance” program combining ballerinas and bulldozers. [...]

Read Full Post »

Praise for George: Gone, or HiDing?

All right, this blog hasn’t been around all that long, but it’s already outlasted a radio format here in the RoeDeo listening area: George 104, which came – and went – in just over two months. (76 days, to be exact – from January 22 to April 7, 2007) George, (as noted earlier in [...]

Read Full Post »

Critics and Clapping

Woke up this morning thinking about the old saw, attributed to Finnish composer Jean Sibelius to “Pay no attention to what the critics say; there has never been set up a statue in honor of a critic.” (Though actually Alex Ross went out and found three not long ago….)
Anyway. The Sibelius [...]

Read Full Post »

A Tale of Two Orchestras: the "other" NPR

Terrific review (more of a commentary, actually) by Bernard Holland in the New York Times the other day about the duelling Russian Orchestras currently touring the US – the Russian National Orchestra, (sometimes called the RNO), and the recently-constituted National Philharmonic of Russia, a/k/a the NPR. Common to both of them is violinist [...]

Read Full Post »

The Globe, By George!

Cruising around the DC radio dial after a few days away to discover another shakeup on the radio dial…WARW, the longtime “classic rock” station has become The Globe, a station blending “world class rock” with an environmental message. The format flip happened on Friday (2/2) at noon, same day, of course, as the [...]

Read Full Post »

Up Off The Canvas (or, The Other Shoe Drops)

All right, it was a big deal to me, but not many other folks paid much attention to the news that I wrote about on Day One – Bonneville’s “Yankee Swop” of its frequencies with Entercom, meaning a likely sayonara for classically-formatted KDFC in San Francisco. Sure enough, the other shoe dropped today [...]

Read Full Post »