Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

See and hear them mambo the living bejesus out of Lenny’s West Side Story example during their recent London Proms concert!
Technorati Tags: Gustavo Dudamel, Leonard Bernstein, London Proms

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[Of late such dreary priorities as livelihood-earning have forced me to neglect this rumpus-room, but I'll use the following, just sent to the editor of www.musicalamerica.com, to get things here going again - until I can finally get around to writing about my two (brief and superficial but still highly memorable) personal encounters with Marlene [...]

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Due to my having left the USA for Europe as early as I did, I never even heard her live, let alone meet her, but her death so comparatively young saddens me every bit as much as if I had.  Out of the recesses of my memory comes an apparently characteristic story I read long ago [...]

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Let me refer you to this official statement dated September 18th, 2001 - in German, but I assume you can read that - issued by the city-state Hamburg the day after the press conference there that ignited that brouhaha.   The night before, only hours after that outrageous utterance, Dr. Christina Weiss, Hamburg’s Senator for Kultur, [...]

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Since I recently brought up Germany’s perennially avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, apopos of the musical mountebankery above the city of Braunschweig, I feel constrained to drop the other shoe so I herewith drop it - rather unconventionally since this takes us all the way back to a report I wrote for www.musicalamerica.com almost six years ago:
September [...]

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There, only a few kilometers beyond the city-state limits over in the Potsdam area, they plan to dedicate a brand-new “barefoot path” (graced by the motto “Walk and Think”) with musical accompaniment performed by wind-players from the … wait for it … Paul Moor Elementary School in Berlin’s northwesternmost Spandau borough.
By cllicking here you can [...]

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Something that happened in - and over - the small German city of Braunschweig (pop. 260,000) last week has plunged me into some long, long thoughts about this musical phenomenon, who since shortly after World War II has held rank at the very top echelon of the hard-core, most uncompromising musical avant-garde.  You might, as [...]

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This astonishing video has the title “The Four-Finger Pianist”.  I did not find it easy to watch, and probably neither at first will you, but what I heard so fascinated me that I forced myself, to my very definite benefit and enlightenment. 
I took it for granted that “The Four-Finger Pianist” meant four fingers on [...]

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This extraordinary videoclip blew in from a thoughtful friend with the Dallas Symphony, accompanied by various peripheral speculations about this demon violinist who - seemingly on the spur of the moment - improvises the damnedest cadenza imaginable for one of the pillars of the strictly Classical repertoire, Mozart’s third Violin Concerto, in G. I needed [...]

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Technorati Tags: Van Cliburn, Kent Nagano, Thomas Quasthoff, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Ernest Fleischmann, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Gustavo Dudamel
The quotation marks above around “discovering” result from the frequent misuse of that term; for instance, hadn’t “the new world” already existed for quite a while prior to 1492?  At the moment I think of one of the primary joys of [...]

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