With the announcement of Yannick Nézet-Séguin (YNS) as the 8th music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, management was finally able to lock in the final (and most crucial) piece of the orchestra’s roster.  Just like a good baseball squad, the orchestra needs not only the best position players, but the right manager to acheive success — players with [...]

I have had the opportunity to hear Mahler’s Symphony N0. 5 performed live on three different occasions.  Each of these times, I was underwhelmed by the final movement.  After more than an hour of music, which,  I naively thought, culminated in the finale, I was always let down by the lack of emotional oomph at [...]

La Bohème
Germany (2008) Dir. Robert Dornhelm
Rolando Villazón, Anna Netrebko
Academy Award-nominated director Robert Dornhelm brings Puccini’s beloved La Bohème a feature-film debut, but manages to step on the opera’s toes more than once in the process.  The stars of the performance are Villazón and Nebtrenko’s voices – both providing incredible depth and bravura performances as Rodolfo and Mimí. The film, however, [...]

Erich Kunzel.  As a student studying film music, it was impossible to escape his name.  A quick search of Amazon, yields 304 CDs with his name attached, most of them containing strains of Hollywood.  While all of my teachers were instructing me to drop John Williams and spend more time with Bach, Erich was proving [...]

Dear residents of 4705 Cedar Ave,
Many apologies for the noise last night and for more noise to come.  Despite what you might have heard, the 10:30pm decision to accompany Phil’s drums with some impromtu trombone was a good idea.  I have not had more fun making music in a really, really long time.
I promise to [...]

I am not a podcast aficionado.  A better description would be: casual listener with urge to make commute bearable.  I have my favorites, but would be hard pressed to name more than ten titles.  The shows I listen to regularly (The Moth, This American Life, Planet Money, Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, and The Sunday [...]

A fortuitous discussion about nicknames is the simplest way to explain the birth and purpose of this blog.  I had tried to blog in the past but lost patience with my film review site and any attempts at a personal blog were dashed by the double punch of solipsism and pretension.  The idea of writing for an [...]