Paul Flight Choruses

Cal Bach just announced its 2013-14 season (or at least, I just got the email), and it's quite nice:

October 11-13: Monteverdi Vespers of 1610
December 13-15: Christmas with Peter Warlock & Henry VIII
February 28-March 2: German Cantatas Circa 1700
May 2-4: Haydn & Mozart Rediscovered

I know some of the music on the May program, because I sang it with Paul Flight, CBS's conductor, with the Haydn Singers or Chora Nova, can't remember which.

Meanwhile, Chora Nova, which sends postcards instead of email, has a good-looking season coming up as well, all at First Congregational. (Last time I saw them, they were at First Presbyterian across the way from First Congo, and lemme say, it's a terrible location to sing in, because you can't hear anyone more than about 3 feet from you, and a terrible location to listen, because the church is dead, dead, dead.)

November 24, 4 p.m. - Dvorak Stabat Mater
March 15, 8 p.m. - From the British Isles
May 24, 8 p.m. - Zelenka Gloria (and presumably other works)

The Annual Cabrillo Program Typo

The program called Music in the Mountains was allegedly on Thursday, August 9.

The web site says Thursday, August 8. I bet that was correct!

Ongoing

I updated the previous posting; make sure you read my comments on Elaine Fine's most recent posting.

I was surprised to check my RSS reader this morning to see how many blogs that were active around 2004-05 have gone dark. On the other hand, I'm reading at least as many blogs that I added in the last few years, as I added Likely Impossibilities, Where's Runnicles, Entartete Music, Boulezian, Von Heute auf Morgan, All is Yar, a couple of London blogs, and others.

I miss The Standing Room, Dial "M" for Musicology (no, wait, they're blogging again!), and Deceptively Simple, among others, but I have to keep in mind that we all have lives: one blog buddy wrote a book, another composed a concerto, a third has family obligations. Yes, there's an ebb and flow, but it's not all losses.

I want to make one point here for readers who don't read Elaine's posting and my comments: I blog because I like writing about music. I also hoped I might get a little more paying work writing about music (I did). I like the discussions, too, and there's been plenty of ebb and flow there. I don't mind that I am not arm-wrestling with ACD these days (what would be the point?) and that I am not spending much time rolling my eyes at certain other bloggers, either.

Related Conversations

On blogging and the blogosphere:

• Tim Rutherford-Johnson, celebrating a decade of The Rambler, muses on the blogosphere.
• Alex Ross posts stats and weighs in. The money quote is "I've had ups and downs with blogging, statistically and spiritually; the chart above is, I think, mostly a reflection of how much energy I've put into the endeavor." Yep, yep, yep.
• Robert Gable has a few words to say too.
• Charles Downey comments on Ionarts at 10.
• Elaine Fine responds. See my comments.

Also see John Marcher's comment on my Blog Metrics posting.

Blog Metrics

Apropos of a discussion from a couple of weeks ago, I've got screen shots showing Google Analytics for this blog for the period July 1, 2009 through June 30, 2013. That's four years of numbers for the following statistics:

1. Visits
2. Unique Visits
3. Page Views

The screen shots are too wide to play nicely with Blogger (groan), so I pasted them into a public Google Doc. 

That bulge in page views in 2009 is interesting, but I see nothing worrisome about readership trends over the last few years. Things look pretty stable, with some ebb and flow and a few peaks and valleys. It would be nice to have more comments, so please sound off as you wish. 

Big thanks, as always, to all who might be reading this. I am grateful that you take the time to drop by and read me.

Women at Cabrillo

This year, Cabrillo has works by 13 composers, of whom one (1) is female. Well, that's an improvement over the years when no works composed by women have been performed at this award-winning contemporary music festival.

No Wonder Angela is Annoyed.

Perhaps this is a former blind item.

WashPost to Bezos?!

This is not a joke, but I wish it were:

Washington Post to be sold to Jeff Bezos

How much media should be in Amazon's (or any other tech company's) the hands of someone who is also the CEO of Amazon?

Seattle Ring: First Report

Joshua Kosman is north of his usual beat and blogging about what is supposed to be the last bring-up of Stephen Wadsworth's Ring production.

Sunday Morning Crab

I stumbled on a cool nerdy t-shirt at a site that sells mostly cool nerdy stuff. The shirt is $3 less at this site than at the site of the company that makes the shirt. On general principles, I thought I would order it from the company's own site anyway.

So....the cost to ship one t-shirt to me is $6, which I found out only after logging in to PayPal. Cafe Press is charging $8.29 to ship me several mugs and a sticker. Say what? It's not that I can't afford the $6, but......it's $4.95 have the shirt shipped to me from the cool nerdy stuff site.

The company's web site has one other annoying oddity: there's no Contact Us link. Instead, it turns out that the Email link, which is next to the label Socialize and a link to the company's Facebook page, is actually a mailto that you use to email them. Silly me: I thought it was the link to share the site with friends by email.

Getting the Details Right

When the legendary judoka Keiko Fukuda, 10th dan, died earlier this year at the age of 99, the NY Times made what is obviously a gross error to anyone who knows something about judo. Here's their description of Ju-no-Kata in her obituary:

By the late ’30s, she had become an instructor and developed an expertise in ju-no-kata, a gentler form of judo.

Wikipedia gets it right:

Ju no Kata (柔の形 Jū-no-kata^?, "forms of gentleness") is a kata (a set of prearranged forms) in Judo. It is designed to teach the fundamental principles of judo, especially the principle of ju(yielding or gentleness).^[1] It consists in three sets of techniques and is performed by a pair of people one acting as an Uke and the other a Tori. The kata can be performed without wearing ajudogi and, as it doesn't involve the completion of any throws, does not need to be performed in a dojo.

You can see why the author decided to emphasize "gentleness" rather than "fundamental principles of judo," but it's still wrong.

I sent email to the author about this, and we had a polite correspondence that included my suggestion of an alternative, more accurate description of Ju-no-Kata, but his editors decided to let it stand.

This kind of thing happens in newspapers every day, of course: a reporter gets something wrong enough that subject matter experts notice the problem, but nonexperts don't. By and large, I think newspapers should be willing to issue clarifications or corrections in these cases.

But here's an obituary where the author gets a technical description right and was given enough space for a lengthy description:

Throat singing, also called overtone singing, is practiced in only a few parts of the world, mostly in Asia. The Tuvan variety, known as khoomei, is the most famous of all. 

Whenever someone sings a note, the column of air in the throat vibrates, producing both a fundamental tone (the note’s basic pitch) and a series of higher pitches — the overtones. 

In conventional singing, the overtones are largely inaudible, manifesting themselves as timbre. In throat singing, through careful manipulation of the mouth and throat, a vocalist can render certain overtones audible, resulting in two, three and even four pitches sounding at a time. 

Properly sung, khoomei sounds as though the singer has ingested a set of bagpipes, with a low drone and a high melody issuing simultaneously from the same mouth.

That's Margalit Fox, writing the obituary for Tuvan master singer Kongar-ol Ondar.

Princeton Symphony Orchestra Plays a Higher Percentage of New Music than SFS

Here's the 2013-14 classical series from the Princeton Symphony Orchestra of Princeton, NJ. (I'm amused that 3/4 of what they're playing on Spanish Night is by French composers, but c'est la vie.) Wish SFS managed 15% to 25% music by living composers instead of four pieces a year among dozens.

PSO Classical Series Season Listing

All performances take place at Richardson Auditorium, Princeton University Campus

American Voices 

Sunday, October 6, 2013

Pre-concert talk, 3 pm

Concert, 4 pm

Juilliard Jazz Orchestra 

Rossen Milanov, conductor

Derek Bermel Migration Series

Aaron Copland Suite from Appalachian Spring

George Gershwin Porgy and Bess: A Symphonic Picture 

Eternal Light

Sunday, November 3, 2013

Pre-concert talk, 3 pm

Concert, 4 pm

Susan Babini, cello

Rossen Milanov, conductor

Aaron Jay Kernis Colored Field 

Richard Strauss Death and Transfiguration

Richard Strauss Salome’s Dance

La Noche Española

Sunday, January 19, 2014

Pre-concert talk, 3 pm

Concert, 4 pm

Jose Franch-Ballester, clarinet 

Rossen Milanov, conductor

Maurice Ravel Rapsodie espagnole

Óscar Navarro II Concerto for Clarinet and Symphonic Orchestra

Emmanuel Chabrier España

Claude Debussy Ibéria

Night and Dreams 

Sunday, March 30, 2014

Pre-concert talk, 3 pm 

Concert, 4 pm 

Dominic Armstrong, tenor

Eric Ruske, French horn

Rossen Milanov, conductor

Julian Grant Dances in the Dark

Benjamin Britten Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings

Hector Berlioz Symphonie fantastique

Classical Masters

Sunday, May 4, 2014

Pre-concert talk, 3 pm 

Concert, 4 pm 

Joseph Kalichstein, piano

Rossen Milanov, conductor

Bach (arr. Webern) Ricercare from The Musical Offering

Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major

Brahms Symphony No. 2 in D Major

Upcoming Women's Self-Defense Class

I am planning to teach a 12-hour women's self-defense class in the Berkeley/Oakland area this fall (dates & location tbd). If you are interested in taking this, let me know; feel free to circulate the news to women who might be interested. Cost will be $95 (no one turned away for lack of funds). Class size limited to 10 students.

The class covers:

• Alertness, awareness, and avoidance
• Basic kicks & strikes
• Escapes from common attacks such as bear hugs, chokes, and hair pulls
• Street smarts
• Securing your home

Jujitsu classes are ongoing, Tuesday nights and Sunday afternoons.

Letter to Hungary

Michael Kaulkin is a Bay Area composer and composition teacher; I heard a work of his for chorus a couple of years back at a Sanford Dole Ensemble concert and liked it a lot. He's got performances of some of his large-scale works posted at Soundcloud, and I highly recommend them. Letter to Hungary, for string orchestra; Waiting.... for chorus, string quartet and piano; Misterium Tremendum for orchestra; and Cycle of Friends, for soprano, chorus, and orchestra. Give 'em a listen!

Amused

Anthony Tommasini reviews a performance of Walter Braunfels's Jeanne d'Arc at the Felsenreitschule, Salzburg, without mentioning how that theater would be most familiar to American audiences.

Peter Grimes on KDFC

San Francisco Opera's latest labor agreements allow the radio broadcast of older performances, and to start, we've got Peter Grimes from 1976, with Jon Vickers, Heather Harper, and Geraint Evans. It'll be on at 8 p.m., Sunday, August 4, on KDFC.

In a rare blog posting, Joshua Kosman is quite rightly cranky that this is about all we'll get from San Francisco Opera in celebrating the Britten centenary, although there was Rape of Lucretia from the Merola program last month. He doesn't take note of the lavish attention being paid Britten, including a beautifully-cast, semi-staged Grimes across the street at San Francisco Symphony, but I will.

What I'm cranky about is that I just can't stand Vickers in anything I've heard him in so far, so I'm going to have to pass on this one.

Who's on First?

Zerbinetta is in NYC, where she gave the Mostly Mozart Festival (and Tommasini's article) hell (I was mild by comparison!)...Meanwhile, Tommasini is in Bayreuth reporting on Frank Castorf's new Ring production, which has been roundly booed....I figured he would be in Santa Fe for Oscar, since it is gay-themed, but it's James Oestreich instead. He hasn't reported in about any of the operas yet, although he has a nice posting in ArtsBeat about hearing the great Schubert Bb piano sonata three times in a week. Too bad about Nel; Wosner sounds interesting enough, and would you expect anything short of an "epic tour-de-force" from Marc-Andre Hamelin?

Sarah Cahill at Old First Church, Friday, August 2, 2013

The pianist performs a program that's typical for her but not many other pianists! The program includes:

• Shinji Eshima's "Delta 88" 
• John Kennedy's Naturali Periclitati" (2007) 
• Samuel Carl Adams' "Piano Step" (2010)
• A few of Ann Southam's "Glass Houses" (1981)
• Two works by Henry Cowell: "Rhythmicana" and "High Color," both written during his years incarcerated at San Quentin. 

8 pm this Friday, August 2nd

Old First Concerts

1751 Sacramento Street at Van Ness, San Francisco

(415) 474-1608

www.oldfirstconcerts.org

Oresteia

Sergei Taneyev's 1895 Oresteia received its U.S. premiere the other day at the Bard Festival. An extreme rarity, it's getting somewhat mixed reviews as a work, with accolades for the performers.

• Steve Smith, Times
• John Yohalem, Parterre Box
• Commentary & Reviews at the OperaLively forum (you'll have to scroll past about 40 lines of header to get to the meat of the page)

Anyone else?

Annals of Copy-Editing

Found in Leitmotive, the quarterly journal of the Wagner Society of Northern California:

In a photo caption on page 11, Jon Vickers.

In running text on page 16, John Vickers - five times.

Random Stuff

Alex Ross is in Bayreuth; I'm not. (I'm not in Seattle or Santa Fe, either, owing to family obligations.) Looking forward to Alex's reports on the Castorf Ring.....Intermezzo has photos of Castorf's production. Goetterdaemmerung on Wall Street sounds like a nod to Chereau and Shaw and a few others...If you're listening to the Proms Ring, by Barenboim, the Staatskapelle Berlin, and a cast of many, consider reading commentary by Intermezzo, Jessica Duchen, Mark Berry, and Finn Pollard, who have a nice range of opinions. Yes, I'm sure there are reviews in the newspapers too, but they're not in my RSS feed.....Anthony Tommasini has an article in the Times how much improved the Mostly Mozart festival is. It depends on which parts of the programming interest you: "staged concert" performances of Nozze (Ivan Fischer), middle-of-the-road programming for the orchestra, and some great chamber programs....Also in the Times, Gustav Mahler's love life before he married the loveliest girl in Vienna.

Peter Buffett on Charity

Peter Buffett, composer and philanthropist, has a fine op-ed in the Times today, about many issues surrounding charitable giving in the United States, inequality, unintended consequences, and the need to do something new. This is crucial to keep in mind:

Because of who my father is [Warren Buffett], I’ve been able to occupy some seats I never expected to sit in. Inside any important philanthropy meeting, you witness heads of state meeting with investment managers and corporate leaders. All are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left.

As a friend used to say, the American Cancer Society's board of directors includes CEOs of chemical companies, so you'll never find the ACS seriously discussing pollution or chemicals in the environment as potential causes of cancer, though they'll happily suggest you quit smoking and get PAP smears done.

Conversation Continued

A new reader mentioned that he'd found me through On an Overgrown Path, where I find that Bob Shingleton has a fine posting in response to this week's postings by me and Elaine Fine. (If you're not already reading Bob, give his blog a try; he knows more music than you do - definitely more than me - and also knows more about the BBC and Sufiism. Not at the same time, necessarily.)

He makes many good points, although as I have said in the past, I consider Twitter a useful tool. If I get some retweets, might mean more people are reading my blog!

In any event, he's right about transparency. For the record, some things I've said before:

• Nobody pays me to write this blog.
• There's no advertising on the blog.
• If a review of mine is in SFCV or Classical Voice, I was paid by them to write it and the ticket was comped, with a very few exceptions.
• If a review appears here, I probably paid for the ticket, but I do get some comps. 
• My tone in paid reviews is more measured and deliberative than my tone here.

Still planning to get together some statistics about my readership.

Proms Rheingold

Couple of reviews on favorite blogs of mine:

Mark Berry, Boulezian
Finn Pollard, Where's Runnicles

I'm listening to it right now, and I'm with Finn. Yeah, the orchestra does sound glorious and there is some fine singing, but Barenboim's take on it is too glossy and polite for me, though he does indeed have a good grip on continuity. Just listen to the entry of the giants, which is around 42:00.  Then compare with Solti. He's not my favorite Wagnerian, but note the accents and the slight sense of drag, as if the giants are so huge they are attached the earth and cannot move. Karajan is punchier than Barenboim, though smoother than Solti. I can't find Krauss on line; my recollection is that he is overwhelming in the section. See, also, as always, Furtwangler.

Update: WTF did they substitute for the anvils? A bunch of cowbells? Sheesh.

Further to Previous

If you're following the current discussion of the ebb and flow of music blogging, here are some related links:

• Whither the Musical Blogosphere, Musical Assumptions, April, 2012
• Community, Nostalgia, and the Classical Music Blogosphere, Iron Tongue of Midnight, April, 2012
• Is There Life After the Huffington Post?, On an Overgrown Path, April, 2012

I recommend reading the comment threads, too.

I'm planning to create a spreadsheet or something with columns for month, number of unique visitors, number of visits, number of pageviews, and number of blog postings. I'm not sure how far back I will go, but it should be interesting. My readership has seasonal highs and lows, has some highs when there is hot news, and seems to also correspond with how much I'm posting.