Category Archive: Concerts

Interactive Ives

Posted at 4:58 PM on October 23, 2009 by Rex Levang
Filed under: Concerts

If you remember our series The MTT Files (MTT being conductor Michael Tilson Thomas), you'll be interested to know that new episodes of the related TV series, Keeping Score, have now been released.

They're accompanied with abundant amounts of online information--text, images, video, and interactive pages. Here's one that lets you be your own Charles Ives. It combines Taps, played by a single trumpeter, with a marching band. The trumpeter stands in a skiff on a New England pond; with your mouse, you can place him off in the distance, or bring him in to shore, as the band plays on (or not). Charles Ives had a fondness for this kind of aural scene-setting--give it a try for yourself.

I guess that means her tour with Tom Jones is out of the question...

Posted at 4:45 PM on January 30, 2007 by Valerie Kahler
Filed under: Concerts

It seems Dame Kiri TeKanawa has some qualms about sharing the stage with underpants. She bowed out of a scheduled 2005 concert series with Australian songster John Farnham after learning that his more zealous fans sometimes fling their knickers onstage.

Why is a 2005 cancellation in the news now? Because the resultant (inevitable?) breach of contract lawsuit is now in court.

Read all about it.

P.S. In case you were wondering, John Farnham and Tom Jones have indeed shared the stage...in 2005, the very same year Kiri bailed for the aforementioned reason - those unreasonable unmentionables.

Tom: "Hey, John, what are you singing about under there?"
John: "Under where?"

bah dum bah!

BBC Proms: Viktoria Mullova

Posted at 11:23 AM on September 8, 2006 by Brian Newhouse (1 Comments)
Filed under: Concerts

Have a world-class Stradivarius you'd like to lend for a few days?

Violinist Viktoria Mullova actually already has one and it's worth a fortune. But with the new airport security measures she's not able to carry it onboard when she flies. She has to check it with luggage. Pause here to reflect: you own a priceless Strad and you're sitting on the tarmac watching the luggage guys sling it under the plane along with the boulder-size bags of your fellow travelers.

When I talked with her yesterday (interview for our Last Night of the Proms broadcast) she really sounded worried about her Minnesota Orchestra appearance next week. Her plan is to drive with a friend from her London home to Heathrow, do her best to convince security to let her carry the Strad onboard in its case. If they refuse, she's going to hand the instrument to her friend who'll deliver it back home. When she lands in Minneapolis she'll start scrambling for the best instrument she can find.

More…

Mullova defected from the Soviet Union 23 years ago. (Here's a nice synopsis of a hair-raising story.) She was on tour in Helsinki and left her state-owned Strad lying on the hotel room bed and fled into Sweden.

Two weeks ago she essentially reversed that scenario when she went to play in Helsinki with the Minnesota Orchestra. This time, she had to 'smuggle' her new Strad into Finland onboard the plane. Refusing to check it with her luggage, she wrapped the instrument in a towel and hid it in a shopping bag.

Comment on this post

Menlo listening highlight

Posted at 10:08 AM on September 6, 2006 by Brian Newhouse
Filed under: Concerts

Antonin Dvorak: Piano Trio in e minor, op. 90, "Dumky"
Wu Han, piano; Ani Kavafian, violin; David Finckel, cello
Listen to the piece

This piece also unfolds as a set of stories, though I don’t see a nice red thread running through it as you can in the Schubert Fantasy. Each of these six movements is its own brilliant dark world. To watch David Finckel’s face during the performance—you can tell he’s enjoying the music in that way, as story: surprised at this turn, almost frightened at the next.

Listen to more Music@Menlo concerts

Menlo listening highlight

Posted at 2:58 PM on August 29, 2006 by Brian Newhouse
Filed under: Concerts

Schubert: Fantasy for Piano, Four Hands, in f, D. 940
Jeffery Kahane, Wu Han, piano
Listen to the piece

I think Schubert must have had read some twisted, tragic story before sitting down to write this, because he's so clearly trying to do the same with this music. He tells it as a story in four movements—four chapters, if you like—but each one flows without a break to the next. Jeffrey Kahane takes the lower part, while Wu Han plays 'right hand.' Afterward Jeffrey was telling me how surprised he was at the power of this particular Steinway, especially the low end, and that if he'd had another set of hands he would've covered his ears! (see post Menlo: noisy world)

Listen to more Music@Menlo concerts

Menlo listening highlight

Posted at 3:41 PM on August 25, 2006 by Brian Newhouse
Filed under: Concerts

Mozart: Piano Quartet in g, K. 478
Wu Han, piano; Ani Kavafian, violin; Carla Maria Rodrigues, viola; Peter Wiley, cello

Listen to the piece

The delicious final course in the musical meal of Menlo's first program.

Listen to more Music@Menlo concerts

Menlo listening highlight

Posted at 11:28 AM on August 23, 2006 by Brian Newhouse
Filed under: Concerts

Mozart: Church Sonatas in F, K. 244; E-flat, K. 67; C, K. 336
Ani Kavafian, Tein-Hsin Wu, violin; Peter Wiley, cello; James Welch, organ

Listen to the piece

These churchy pieces always make me smile, knowing a bit about the complexity of Mozart's character, especially his delight in bathroom humor. But here he is being a good pious young man, and a professional composer trying to please his boss.

Listen to more Music@Menlo concerts

Menlo listening: piano trio

Posted at 2:59 PM on August 14, 2006 by Brian Newhouse
Filed under: Concerts

Shostakovich: Piano Trio No. 2 in e, op. 67
—Derek Han, piano; Ani Kavafian, violin; Peter Wiley, cello
Listen to the piece

Mozart celebrated birthday number 250 this year, so he was the headline of the 2006 Menlo festival, but the sub-head was Shostakovich who has 100 candles on his cake. Not that there’s much celebrating going on in this piece, written in the horrible year of 1944. If you like your music nice and dramatico, here you go. If you’ve only got a minute to sample it, drop the needle on the very beginning of the first movement and check out Peter Wiley’s beautiful, eerie cello solo, pitched so high that it sounds like a completely different instrument.

Listen to more Music@Menlo concerts

Menlo listening: Shostakovich

Posted at 5:44 PM on August 12, 2006 by Brian Newhouse
Filed under: Concerts

Shostakovich: Sonata for Cello and Piano in d minor, op. 40
Listen to the piece

For Menlo's first three seasons, co-artistic directors David Finckel and Wu Han never appeared in duet together because they—a phenomenal husband-wife cello-piano team—were very conscious that Menlo should not be all about them. Their focus was on the music itself and the artists they'd invited. But here in the first moments of the first 2006 concert they paired up for this fantastic performance that shows why they are who they are.

Listen to more Music@Menlo concerts

Menlo: final post

Posted at 2:03 PM on August 7, 2006 by Gayle Ober
Filed under: Concerts

“Oh, to have a camera right now!,” Brian Newhouse lamented on Friday afternoon as we watched Jorja Fleezanis, the Concertmaster of the Minnesota Orchestra, rub “Tiger Balm” into the shoulders of one of the young violinists studying at Music@Menlo. We all stood around a picnic table on a bright sunny California afternoon and watched as Jorja accompanied her ministrations with stern, caring words about stretching, warming up and generally taking care of the body during these intense rehearsals. Meanwhile all around us, the younger students were playing ping pong or laughing like they were at a playground.

Having spent some time at the Aspen Music Festival, also a marvelous training ground for young musicians, I tried to remember if I’d ever witnessed such a personal interaction between a professional musician and a student. I’m sure it happens there as well, but just the sheer size of that festival, versus the intimacy of Music@Menlo, would preclude an outsider like me from sharing in the joy and awe of that moment.

This opportunity to hear great chamber music and watch as professional musicians teach others their craft flows everywhere throughout Menlo. And, it’s done right out in the open for all to see. From open rehearsals to the coaching sessions, those of us watching are invited to be a part of the learning. One more example:

Saturday morning was the final coaching sessions for the Sunday concert given by the 18-and-under students. The session began with the oldest students and finished with the very youngest. Some of them could be described as prodigies, others are just talented young people who work very hard to play this well. During this coaching session, Wu Han (coffee cup and cell phone in hand) took time to offer last-minute advice on technical and musical matters. She also heaped praise on every student and encouraged those of us in the audience to help her through our applause and cheering.

Then David Finckel and she talked about getting on and off the stage, gave tips on how to manage your audience when you have a quiet ending, and how to get your face out of the score during your solo part so the audience knows that something special is happening. Each student is also required to speak to the audience via a little introduction to their piece. No detail was forgotten and no opportunity for praise overlooked.

In the midst of creating some of the most memorable chamber music concerts I’ll ever attend, I could not help but be reminded of the fact that Wu Han and David and their teaching and performing colleagues are creating the next generation of chamber musicians. They are also nurturing and educating the future of our world and doing it with great love and affection for the music and for those who create it. The students are asked to be the best they can be but in an environment that acknowledges that they are indeed emerging human beings who need more than just lessons, coachings and performances.

If I were the parent of one of the young students at the Music@Menlo Festival, I would want to know that in addition to giving the incredible musical experiences, someone rubbed Tiger Balm on my child’s tired and sore shoulders and made sure they played ping pong after lunch.

Listen to Music@Menlo concerts

Menlo: Ara Guzelimian

Posted at 3:31 PM on August 4, 2006 by Brian Newhouse
Filed under: Concerts

Headed home now, wishing everyone who’s stopped by to read this blog could spend at least a day with Music@Menlo.

Ara Guzelimian, Carnegie Hall’s Artistic Adviser, gave the lecture-demo last night and took the audience into Mozart’s wind music. That topic didn’t really grab my lapels when I heard it was coming: Mozart was all about the symphony, the operas, the piano concertos, and the string quartets – not necessarily winds. But working with musicians onstage and with bits of recordings, Ara showed us how Mozart so often picked a wind instrument when he wanted to say something uniquely powerful.

Ara didn’t even mention the late clarinet masterworks (the Concerto, the Quintet) which would’ve made his point right there. Instead, he went into the piano concertos, operas like The Magic Flute, Clemenza di Tito, and even the pivotal C Minor String Quintet, and showed how wind instruments either inspired them or put blood in their veins.

Menlo 2006 is all about the world’s most famous composer, but also the composer you hear on hold and in the elevator, the composer you take for granted and don’t really hear after a while. Last night I got an ear scrubbing. I’ll probably grab some perfect stranger by the elbow in an elevator someday and say, “Listen! Clarinets in pairs! Mozart’s voice of angels…”

Like I say, I wish everyone could be here at least a day or so, to remember why he or she fell in love with this music in the first place.

Menlo: the set and setting

Posted at 3:18 PM on August 4, 2006 by Gayle Ober
Filed under: Concerts

As MPR producer Brian Newhouse and I stood on the grounds of the Menlo School yesterday, I could see why Artistic Directors Wu Han and David Finckel chose this location for their festival, Music@Menlo. With its bright white buildings, gravel driveways and mature trees, it is a beautiful place that encourages you to come in and stay for a while.

Shortly after arriving, we were greeted by the head of the Menlo School, Norman Colb. As we looked up at the magnificent old mansion that anchors the school, he told us the "real" story of how Wu Han and David chose this place. It goes something like this: One winter when the school was on break, Wu Han and David were visiting a friend who lived not far from the Menlo campus. Their host insisted that they see the grand ballroom of the mansion on campus, which he claimed had wonderful acoustics. There's a bit of a mystery about how Wu Han, David, and their host garnered a key to get into the building, but in they went. What they discovered was a beautiful space that begged to be filled with glorious music.

Yesterday we heard music from noon onward, but it seemed like a very short day, with performances from the youngest members of the Festival Academy—10-year-olds playing early Mozart works for piano and violin—to some of our nation's most accomplished wind players giving us snippets of the magic that we would hear in future concerts. We might expect this from a summer festival led by two of America’s finest chamber musicians, but there is such a spirit of discovery and unbridled joy on the grounds during the day and in the concert hall in the evening that makes me want to gather a group of friends and return next year for more. As I listen to the broadcasts in the weeks ahead, I'm eager to experience this visit to Music@Menlo again.

Gayle Ober is Director of Classical Programming at American Public Media and Minnesota Public Radio. She joined Brian Newhouse in Menlo on Wednesday.

Menlo: Nicolas van Pouke

Posted at 10:38 AM on August 3, 2006 by Brian Newhouse (31 Comments)
Filed under: Concerts

I’m taking Jayson’s point when he responded to Monday’s blog and, while I assure him that every effort is made to keep the Boredom Quotient as low as possible, I’m going to yield the floor to someone whose B.Q. is in deep negative numbers.

He’s Nicolas van Pouke, all of 13 years old, who came from the Netherlands to study piano at Music@Menlo. Ten, twenty years from now the people at this year’s Festival are going to say “We heard him in ’06…” This kid is an animal, and after a concert last night he came up to me and asked if I’d like to listen to his performance at the finals of the Princess Christina Competition in his native Holland this spring. Very shyly he handed me this CD.

Here he is playing the first movement of a Haydn Sonata (Hob. XVI: 50) live in front of judges and audience in The Hague. I’d bet this month’s rent that Nicolas, who hasn’t started to shave yet, is going places. Let me know what you think, Jayson.

Listen to Nicolas van Pouke perform the first movement of a Haydn Sonata

Listen to more Music@Menlo concerts

Comment on this post

Menlo: students and the pros

Posted at 11:19 AM on August 2, 2006 by Brian Newhouse (8 Comments)
Filed under: Concerts

You should see how the eyes on the Music@Menlo student musicians narrow as they watch the veterans here perform. The pros – all of whom have international careers touring and recording – make it look so easy. Last night for instance, the Orion String Quartet had us in the palm of their hand with Mozart’s haunting arrangement of Bach’s Prelude and Fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier. Watch the kids’ faces during moments like that and you see this great mix of awe and determination forming: ‘I want to do that’ and ‘I will do that.’

In my talk to these students the other day I told them that, while they’re busy practicing and dreaming, give some thought about how they’re going to position themselves if the big record companies and promoters are a little slow in calling. How can you make your art, I asked them, how can you be useful to your community – which by the way is a pretty solid strategy for gathering great press and advancing your careers.

In a story taken from my own backyard, I told them about a Minneapolis elementary school that’s trying hard to keep music in the curriculum. I showed them Jerry Holt’s gorgeous slide show that ran with this Star Tribune article. Check it out yourself here.

Now go back and stop the show when the counter is 15 seconds from the end. What do you see in that photo?

That girl’s eyes have stayed with me ever since this story ran in the paper two months ago. She’s part of Minneapolis’ burgeoning east-African refugee community and most likely has seen things I hope never to see. But there she is, that bright shiny flute in her hands and she’s doing her best. I told the Menlo kids that, while you can see many things in that photo, something you can’t miss is plain, simple opportunity. This girl is waiting for us, all of us, including the future stars of Menlo, to show her how. Being useful to her could jump-start or be a whole career right there.

Listen to Music@Menlo concerts

Comment on this post

Menlo: outdated by the time you read this

Posted at 12:09 PM on August 1, 2006 by Brian Newhouse (1 Comments)
Filed under: Concerts

I gave a talk the other day to 40 or so young musicians who’ve come to study at Music@Menlo, its title being “Your Career and the Troublingly Open Arms of Media.” I’d hoped to give them a few inside tips on making recordings so that they would all become nice and famous. But the problem, I started by telling them, was that these tips would be obsolete by dinnertime.

Sooner or later these performers (8-28 years old) will want to give media a great big hug. But media and technology and the legalities that swirl around them shape-shift every six hours. How to succeed? Here’s one credo and as far as I can see it’s the most reliable one around: more is better. Chris Andersen, Wired Magazine’s editor-in-chief, said recently that musicians have to become “agnostic” about media and create as many ways as possible for the audience to find them; don’t presume ahead of time how people will want to find music. I added that, while musicians and consumers get excited about new technologies, also don’t forget that radio (very solid research says) is still going to be the dominant way for Americans to hear classical music for at least the next five to ten years.

That’s it in a nutshell, though how these musicians execute on that, and in particular make money at it, is a whole semester’s worth of classes. The Menlo kids asked smart questions afterward, but I could tell they’re nervous – reaching for a door they know someday they’ll want to open yet not sure what’ll be behind it.

Talented, passionate kids. How they love this music. I wish I could tell them.

Listen to Music@Menlo concerts

Comment on this post

Menlo: noisy world

Posted at 9:49 AM on July 31, 2006 by Brian Newhouse
Filed under: Concerts

There's a pretty good chance that if you're reading a classical music blog, you have yet to experience the phenomenon of Aly & AJ. (If you're a parent of a girl 6-16 years old, all you need to do to get up to speed is ask your daughter.) For the newcomers, Aly & AJ are 16-year-old California pop-rockers. Tall, slim, blonde twin sisters who write songs in their bedroom, a couple years ago they made it very big. Your 6-16 year-old girl wants to be Aly or AJ. Heck, I wouldn't mind being Aly or AJ.

My two daughters are frantic fans and their most outlandish dream came true last week when they called a San Francisco radio station and won four tickets to a concert, the first time anyone in our house has ever won anything by calling a radio station. They even got backstage passes. When she heard she'd won, my nine-year-old let out a scream that I felt in my eyeballs. She and her little sister then jumped on the bed and pretended to faint.

So Friday night, my wife and I and two extremely excited little girls left the classical music Valhalla of Music@Menlo for an open-air theater south of town. We were surrounded by 5,000 other extremely excited little girls. Ours were wide-eyed at the fashions in the crowd and the mountains of speakers onstage. When Aly and AJ bounded on we were swamped by that same scream I'd heard the day before—times 5,000. Our daughters danced in the aisles to music that was peppy and loud and unintelligible. They tried to get me to dance and they screamed themselves hoarse. We had a blast. Backstage afterward, Aly and AJ were as nice as could be to my girls.

The next night I was back at Menlo for chamber music. As much as I love this stuff, I have to admit that I was ready to feel let down; after getting my ears pasted back by 60,000-watt speakers and feeling (if only for an evening) With It, Schubert was going to sound just a little antique, a little too polite.

But Wu Han and Jeffrey Kahane opened the concert playing Schubert's Fantasy in F Minor for Four Hands on a wide-open nine-foot Steinway and I have to tell you that that being 30 feet away from a world-class concert grand played by two such athletic pianists made an impression that Aly & AJ with all their watts could do well to contemplate. Schubert made the bigger impact. His Fantasy unrolls like a brooding and twisted story but interrupted by moments of hope… Wu Han and Kahane put me on the edge of my chair.

I know I'm in apples and oranges land here by comparing. But this is the way my mind has always worked, jostling experiences to make sense of a noisy world. Don't you do the same? These two concerts were as different as they could be and I liked them both. But when I hear stories of pop music's omnipotence and classical music's irrelevance, it's nice to road test the assumptions once in a while. On a northern-California weekend, classical did just fine, capturing at least one heart and mind to a depth that no other music can.

Listen to Music@Menlo concerts

Menlo: Joseph Silverstein conversation

Posted at 11:22 AM on July 28, 2006 by Brian Newhouse (1 Comments)
Filed under: Concerts

Temperatures around the Bay Area are blessedly cooling, but Music@Menlo kept a little bit of heat going yesterday by taking on the incendiary topic of…vibrato! Joseph Silverstein led a public conversation over the lunch hour about the role of research in violin performance. Silverstein's had a great career as the longtime concertmaster of the Boston Symphony and conductor of the Utah Symphony, but I had no idea he was such a scholar as well. He's read enormous amounts of the literature on violins going back at least 250 years—one author contradicting another while a third has an ax to grind against a fourth, and then come modern researchers who have biases and publish-or-perish agendas—all of them with a slightly or grandly different take on how much vibrato a player should add to each note. Questions were flying around the auditorium yesterday about what Leopold Mozart said in 1756, or Geminiani in 1751, and whether the great violin inspiration of Brahms, Joseph Joachim, really was 'dry' in the whole vibrato department? Oy. What’s a violinist to do? I guess flock to Menlo to have this exact kind of conversation.

Listen to Music@Menlo concerts

Comment on this post

Menlo: no one's anonymous

Posted at 10:38 AM on July 27, 2006 by Brian Newhouse (1 Comments)
Filed under: Concerts

It was just a little side comment, but it opened up this whole festival for me. I was talking with Patrick Castillo, artistic administrator for Music@Menlo, and mentioning how much the Festival seems to have grown since I was here two years ago. Three weeks of concerts instead of two, over 100 volunteers instead of a few dozen, a burgeoning cadre of interns who want to learn festival-izing from these pros...Menlo is bigger than ever—oh, and every concert is immediately sold out. In the parlance of Silicon Valley (where Menlo's nestled), all of this means that demand is ahead of supply, a metric the Valley learned the hard way a half-dozen or so years ago. So with growth all around you, Patrick, what’s next? Just more and bigger?

He smiled and looked out the window. "One of the things that makes this all work is the scale. For now, it's small enough so that no one's anonymous here."

I love that. No one’s anonymous. You see one of the world's greatest musicians in intense rehearsal with a group of 18-year-olds, or the lead administrator helping a cellist schlep his instrument and a clutch of music stands across campus before a concert, and a dozen similar acts of community every day. You're known here. Can you say the same of your workplace? If not, why not? And is "we're too big" a very satisfying answer?

Music@Menlo may become the next big American music festival, just as big Aspen or Marlboro, but for now small is definitely beautiful.

Listen to previous years' concerts

Comment on this post

Menlo: Mozart festival heats up

Posted at 9:21 AM on July 26, 2006 by Brian Newhouse
Filed under: Concerts

You know those big industrial fans you can rent at Menards after your basement floods? I got to St. Mark's Episcopal Church an hour before the first Menlo concert last night and three of those monsters were going full tilt in the church aisles. No floodwaters anywhere, just another day of heat that made page one of USA Today. The fans were trying to shove the heat outdoors as if it were a batch of unwelcome freeloaders who hadn't bought tickets.

They did a good job and by eight the place was cooled down and every seat taken, as are all the seats for every single Menlo concert. Silicon Valley has been waiting a whole year for this.

The Festival's subtitle this year is "Returning to Mozart" and most of the concerts are programmed along these lines: on the first half last night we heard Shostakovich's Piano Trio No. 2, written in the horrible year of 1944. The cello starts all alone, high, strained, and utterly bereft—like an orphan crying in the back corner of some wartime cave. But after intermission, here came Mozart's C Major Piano Sonata for Four Hands and his G Minor Piano Quartet. Especially the slow movement of the Quartet—it was a balm, as if someone had gone into that cave and picked the little one up and carried it into the sun.

That's Menlo's point this year, that Mozart's humanity still helps our souls in a way that 200+ years haven’t dimmed in the least.

Listen to previous years' concerts

Menlo: close encounters

Posted at 12:33 PM on July 25, 2006 by Brian Newhouse
Filed under: Concerts

The 100+ heat broke at sunset, so the Festival's first event was a sellout. This crowd is rabid for classical music and just as hungry for information about it. So guest lecturer Bruce Adolphe launched into the first of several talks that'll take us into the world of Mozart, who turned 250 this year (had you heard?) and is a central focus of Menlo 2006. Bruce has as many hyphens as Bernstein: composer-pianist-broadcaster-educator-lecturer-impresario, and every week on NPR's Performance Today he also plays a stump-the-audience game where he sits down at the piano and disguises a pop tune in the style of a famous classical composer. You can tell he adores having an audience in front of him, and if you picture a whip smart classical-music-loving Sid Caesar going deep into Mozart's Piano Quartet in G Minor, you have a good idea of how I spent 90 minutes last night.

The audience laughed nearly the whole way through. But Bruce also had a serious and surprising point for most of us: Mozart's music isn't just grace and beautifully classical proportion all the time. Mozart has as much to do with a kind of 'spoken' music. Listen to it and you can hear a kind of everyday language turned into notes. A sentence here, a half-repetition of it there, an emphatic aside to make sure you got the point—all very human and approachable. A great set-up to hear the whole Quartet in tonight's first Menlo concert.

Listen to previous years' concerts

Music@Menlo

Posted at 5:04 PM on July 24, 2006 by Brian Newhouse
Filed under: Concerts

And we're off! Music@Menlo gets underway tonight with the first of the Encounters, a multimedia lecture/presentation designed to open up the music we'll hear tomorrow in Menlo's first concert. It's going to be very interesting to watch audience turnout this year. As my dad would've said coming in from the field in late July, It's hotter'n heck out here. Up and down the Bay Area of California, communities are being walloped with heat they’ve never seen before. Late Monday afternoon right now and it's nearly 100 degrees in Menlo. Normally, you’ve got 82 sunny degrees and a light breeze off the Bay, day after day after day—one of the reasons that real estate runs something like a thousand dollars a square inch here. But this is smashing through records and knocking out power grids and emergency shelters are trying to get seniors inside where it's cool. So, when they're used to Paradise will audiences venture into what feels a little like Hades? (Coming from Minnesota, concert presenters ask the reverse when it's January and a zillion below zero. Always the risk, which smarts in light of the endless hours of rehearsal, planning, fund-raising… ) I'll let you know.

If they stay away, it won't be for unimaginative programming in the concerts or the level of artistry. Check out this great lineup: http://www.musicatmenlo.org/

Music@menlo audio archives

Cow, Colleges, and Village Band Concerts

Posted at 8:43 PM on July 21, 2006 by John Zech
Filed under: Concerts

In the summertime you can find a lot of concerts in the parks of our region, but next week in Northfield you can hear band concerts the way they would have been given more than a century ago.

The Vintage Band Festival will feature more than 15 European and American bands with over 40 outdoor concerts in four days. Each day begins with noon concerts in several city parks, with continuous music into the night.

These are very experienced bandsmen (and women??) who wear period band uniforms and play authentic period instruments.

As an old bandsman myself, I wanted to give you the heads up on what promises to be quite a festival in a lovely town just south of the Twin Cities. You can find out the complete list of ensembles, schedules, etc. at their website.

Maybe I'll see you there!

Standing on Tradition

Posted at 11:09 PM on April 11, 2006 by Valerie Kahler
Filed under: Concerts

In response to Don's post about "requisite" standing Os, I have this to say:

[leaps to feet, clapping wildly]

Bravo! Bravo!

Having been on both sides of a perfunctory standing ovation, I'll say that as a performer it can be embarrassing when you know the performance didn't merit an A+. It's one thing if it's Grandma and Aunt Marge (and the concert was in the living room!) but entirely another when you sense the crowd going through the motions. And yes, as an audience member I've often felt compelled rather than impelled to stand.

Tangent:

Is this phenomenon at all related to the profusion of tip jars in the last 5-10 years? Used to be tipping was for service...you know, walking from here to there, carrying something. And, importantly, tipping was for waiters/bussers who were making below minimum wage and relied on tips for the bulk of their incomes.

Now, tip jars are everywhere - at the coffee counter, at the sandwich shop, the airport parking shuttle.

Lest you think I'm just another stingy curmudgeon: I'm a former waiter myself and a notorious overtipper. I almost always tip unless I'm met with outright surliness.