by Sedgwick Clark
In the past two weeks I heard two concerts I’ll never forget, both at Carnegie Hall.Â
The first was on February 17, with my favorite European orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw, playing my favorite Mahler symphony, the Third. The CGB was Mahler’s favorite orchestra and its music director, Willem Mengelberg, the only conductor other than [...]
By Sedgwick Clark
I just received the press kit for the Philadelphia Orchestra’s 2010-11 season, announced today, and it’s a humdinger (haven’t used that word since I was in Muncie). The veteran Charles Dutoit, now 73, whose association with the orchestra dates back to 1980, is currently in his second of a four-year appointment as chief [...]
By Sedgwick Clark
Everyone’s been raving about Pierre Boulez’s fountain of youth as he nears his 85th birthday on March 26. I missed his Vienna Philharmonic concert at Carnegie Hall on January 16 of music by Schoenberg, Webern, and Mahler. But I caught his pair of Chicago Symphony concerts at Carnegie and was once again riveted by the [...]
By Sedgwick Clark
Beep . . . beep . . . beep . . . stuttered a dying hearing aid battery during Carnegie Hall’s Boston Symphony concert last Monday (2/1). Heads turned throughout the audience, trying to locate the high-pitched nuisance.  Announcements were made before each of the Ravel works on the second half of the program, but [...]
By Sedgwick Clark
Note to the blogosphere: Sorry, I’ve been in Muncie. But I return with an exciting discovery.
Tamara Stefanovich. Hers was a new name for me until her piano recital of works by Bartók, Carter, Ligeti, and Rachmaninoff last Wednesday (1/27) at Poisson Rouge. Simply put, I was bowled over and urge anyone within Internet [...]
by Cathy Barbash
Yesterday’s MusicalAmerica.com included a report that the Shen Yun Performing Arts, a so-called four-year-old Chinese traditional touring ensemble, had been forced to cancel its Hong Kong shows because several of its performers had been refused visas to Hong Kong. The company believed “that the visas were denied because some of the scenes depicted [...]
by Cathy Barbash
Members of the Major University Presenters (MUPs) group on a recent China research trip could be excused for feeling culturally disoriented in more ways than one. Large-scale Christmas decorations were everywhere, even waitresses in Beijing’s iconic Quanjude Peking Duck emporium sported Santa hats. When I searched local markets for Year of the Tiger [...]
The evening before the pageant at Obama’s State Dinner, a brand new work greeted the President in grass-roots circumstances. Here is a reprint of Tony Hutchinson and Dale Kreisher’s superb report:
The White House Blog
(The Book of) Change Has Come
Posted by Dale Kreisher and Tony Hutchinson on November 19, 2009 at 12:26 PM EST
One [...]
China Watchers may have noted the recent WhiteHouse.gov photos of Obama’s after-dinner entertainment in Beijing. The performance after the State Dinner at the Great Hall of the People reinforced China’s popular “happy family” theme:
I guessed right, the peacock dancer was the inevitable Yang Liping from Yunnan.
Per my Chinese colleagues, the other performers included:
“Super Oriental [...]
by Cathy Barbash
Last month I stopped in on the Arts Fair associated with the 11th China Shanghai International Arts Festival. Fair operations and content were, for the most part, profoundly disappointing. Created as China’s answer to Arts Presenters, they’ve never gotten it right. As a result, attendance numbers are poor, most major agents, venues and [...]
