Dégustation

Reviewing the Boston Chamber Music Society.
Boston Globe, August 29, 2011.

Crazy for trying and crazy for crying

Reviewing the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and Handel's Orlando.
Boston Globe, August 18, 2011.

Waiting for summer, his pastures to change

Discursive:

The 2011 Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, part 1.
NewMusicBox, August 8, 2011.

Concise:

The 2011 Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, part 2.
Boston Globe, August 9, 2011.

Writing these round-up reviews for the Globe is always a dance between enthusiasm—it's a great platform for saying things about works that deserve to have things said about them—and frustration: given the space limitations, there's simply no way you can mention every piece. For a variety of reasons, these pieces were left on the cutting room floor:

• Eve Belgarian's Robin Redbreast, which sets a Stanley Kunitz poem in an almost distractingly mannered recitative (here sung by tenor Martin Bakari), but backs it up with a combination of hollow, chirping piccolo (Henrik Heide) and electronically-altered birdsong that was very, very cool;
• Richard Festinger's Peripeteia, a running-note divertimento for clarinet (Danny Goldman, who was quite good), violin (Wang Fang Wong), and cello (Marybeth-Brown Plambeck), music that, despite some mid-piece longueurs, was remarkably successful at pinning improvisatory fluidity to the notated page;
• Jonathan Keren's Multiscala, combining a mandolin part of familiar-yet-unfamiliar extended strumming techniques (played by Avi Avital) with a string trio (Johanna Gosshans, Daniel Getz, and Jeremy Lamb), running quick-fire variations, like turning some exotic artifact over and over in one's hands; and
• Bernard Rands' Tre Espressioni, the festival's oldest piece (1960), played by Ursula Oppens on her Sunday recital, and, indeed, expressionistic, aphoristic slabs of demonstrative old-school modernism.

Further reading: Jeremy Eichler, Allan Kozinn (1, 2), Andrew Pincus (1, 2).

Stop making sense

Reviewing Boston Midsummer Opera's L'Italiana in Algeri.
Boston Globe, July 29, 2011.

The atomic number of zirconium

Today is my birthday. This year's honored co-celebrant is Serge Koussevitzky, who would have turned 137 today, if only he had actually put his arms into the sleeves of his overcoat more often. Get past the credits of this late-1940s bit of USIS propaganda, and you can see the man in action, conducting Beethoven's Egmont Overture:



There's a story behind this film: it was a single-camera shoot, so Koussevitzky and the BSO pre-recorded the overture, then played along with the recording for several takes; Koussevitzky apparently grew increasingly angry that he couldn't deviate from his own interpretation.

My lovely wife threw a party last weekend to mark my implacable aging. You are sad that you weren't there! You can, however, simulate the occasion via drink. Here's what I concocted for unsuspecting guests:

Second Score

1 oz (30 ml) rye whiskey
⅔ oz (20 ml) pineapple juice
⅔ oz (20 ml) lime juice
⅓ oz (10 ml) apricot brandy
⅓ oz (10 ml) rosé vermouth

Shake well with ice and strain into a cocktail glass; top with

2 oz (60 ml) cold champagne

Cutting down on alcohol? Good heavens, why? Have you seen what this world is coming to? Nevertheless, here's one for kids of all ages; name courtesy of Jack Miller, who also baked the birthday cake pictured above, a cake that will be spoken of for years to come in hushed, awestruck tones.

Four For Tea

1 oz (30 ml) double-strength green tea
1 oz (30 ml) pineapple juice
⅔ oz (20 ml) lime juice
2 tsp (10 ml) pomegranate molasses

Shake with ice, strain into a glass, and top with

2 oz (60 ml) sparkling apple juice or seltzer

Pomegranate molasses can be found in the Middle Eastern aisle of your local supermarket, or at least where all the couscous and falafel mix gets shelved, I would think. I also used it as part of the brine for twelve pounds of pulled pork, and it worked really rather well. Shahia tayba!

When your dreamboat turns out to be a footnote

I was out of town and otherwise occupied last week, which meant that I missed Ethen Iverson's reading list. His list of jazz books is now added to my own to-do list, seeing as how I've only managed about half of those. His classical list is also superb—I would also, off the top of my head (and avoiding biographies, as Ethan did), add Peter Conrad's A Song of Love and Death (probably my favorite book on opera); Schoenberg's Style and Idea collection (what can I say, I find Arnold good company); Pierre Bernac's The Interpretation of French Song (dazzlingly deep, even if you disagree with it it, it's the one book you have to specifically disagree with); and Nicolas Slonimsky's Lexicon of Musical Invective (it seems like it should get old, yet it never, never does). Irwin Bazelon's film music book (which Ethan mentions) is excellent and in-depth, but I find it kind of curiously bitchy regarding genre films; Christopher Palmer's more fanboy-ish but, in its own way, equally thorough The Composer in Hollywood is, I find, a nice balance. And I was mildly surprised that the original Pitchfork list that inspired this exercise neglected Nik Cohn's Awopbopaloobop Awopbamboom, still my favorite book on rock and roll, though to list it is to, admittedly, be forced to acknowledge that rock had pretty much run its course by the late 60s.

But I'm coming pretty late to this game, so I thought I'd mix it up a little. So, instead of music books, here's a list (again, off the top of my head) of five books that aren't about music but still, nonetheless, changed my musical thinking, directly or obliquely.

• Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. History that not only gives proper due to the minutiae of great historical endeavors, but knows and illustrates that such details are utterly inseparable from the prevailing historical context, even when the people involved are tunnel-vision unaware of that context—a notion permanently embedded in my view of music. Also: a demonstration of the poetic capacity of explaining even the most arcane technical niceties.
  
  
• Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes. I enjoyed this book long before I actually understood what Wills was doing with it. It's not only about Nixon, but about the entire period of American history leading up to his presidency; Wills spends lots of time deconstructing and dismantling one book or study of that history after another. After enough time, I've realized that any book will yield contradictions if you make enough incisions in it, but that's Wills' point, I think: American history is best understood by laying its contradictions bare. It's an idea that has served me well in getting my head around a piece of music on too many occasions to count.
  
  
• Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française. Really, anything by Michelet—any of the volumes of his Histoire de France, any of his quirky studies on various aspects of human nature and behavior. If you have the time, struggling (as I do) with a French dictionary handy is advisable—English translations of Michelet tend to be old, somewhat clunky, and incomplete. But even such second-hand Michelet is worth it—there's nobody quite like him for breadth, for structure, for pacing. The most symphonic historian of all time.
  
  
• Henry Adams, History of the United States During the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison. Adams had issues, to be sure—he was self-pitying, he was almost comically pessimistic, he was irrationally anti-Semitic (though more in real life than in his books). But he was, I think, the greatest American prose stylist of the 19th century. All of Adams is worth reading, but the History is Adams at his best—casually magisterial, intricately witty. To read Adams is to understand the relationship between complexity and freedom—the full Victorian profusion of his sentence structure, and his mastery of it, allows him to place the key point of each idea wherever he wants. He can lead with it; he can end with it; he can use it as a fulcrum between phrases, between clauses, between qualifications and demurrals. And, as a result, when Adams does drop in an utterance of Hemingway-esque pithiness, it jabs harder than Hemingway ever did. If you've ever wondered why my own sentences tend towards the convoluted, or why I harbor what might seem to be an inexplicable fondness for music others might consider dense and difficult, a big part of it is that my education included Adams' Education.
  
  
• Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum. At first, I was going to go with The Role of the Reader, my favorite collection of Eco's semiotic texts, but I think his novel has more deeply embedded itself into my musical thinking, particularly because I'm so obsessed with Romanticism and its continuing hangover. Eco makes black comedy out of the tendency of the myth to take on a life of its own, a mechanism that has not only become prevalent in music (not just classical) since the 1800s, but has pretty much driven it. The first step of coming to terms with post-Beethoven music history is to be able to simultaneously acknowledge both myth's fictional status and its palpable, almost indelible persistence.

P.S. Yes, this is the second time I have gone to that particular Elvis Costello well for a post title. It's not just books that take up permanent residence in what might otherwise be useful parts of my brain.

Blue Light Special

Reviewing Jean-Yves Thibaudet.
Boston Globe, July 21, 2011.

Update (7/22): I reviewed the second of Thibaudet's Ravel recitals here.

Freedom of expression

One of my summer resolutions was to actually practice, which, given my seemingly hard-wired summer-vacation mental entrainment, is not an insignificant task. So Rhapsody in Blue has been sitting on the piano for a few weeks now—apt summer fare, I think. What I've been finding most interesting about the music this time around is how tricky it is, and the unusual way in which it's tricky: Not so much technically—there's certainly some finger-tangling passages, but on the whole, it's hardly as forbidding as, say, Islamey—but temporally. Rhapsody in Blue is a piece in which it can be fiercely difficult to find the right tempo.

This is not for lack of indication; Gershwin has tempo markings all over the place, amply garnished with ritardandi and accelerandi and rubati both explicit and implicit. Here's what you get on the first four pages alone:

Molto moderato (♩=80)
poco rit.
Moderato assai
tranquillo
poco scherzando
pochissimo rall.
a tempo
poco rall.
tranquillo
deciso
scherzando
Poco agitato

... and so forth. Out of 30 pages (this is in my very old, beat-up edition of the solo piano version) I count 23 that carry at least one indicated alteration of tempo. But the only metronome marking you get is that very first one. (And that seems to have been a late addition—the original manuscript of Ferde Grofé's orchestration simply marks the beginning as "Slowly.") Rhapsody in Blue is a piece that asks for near-constant tempo fluctuations, but puts the parameters of those fluctuations almost entirely in the hands of the performer.

It's also a piece for which, thanks to recording technology, the acquiring of an extra-notational performance tradition has been more or less completely documented. Probably the most obvious alteration has been in the big Andantino melody, this one:


Gershwin's 1924 recording with the Paul Whiteman orchestra takes all of this at the same tempo (as does, a little more loosely, Gershwin's piano-roll rendition), which is what's indicated, and which sounds weird to our ears, because the more common practice now is to double-time the last six bars of that phrase. That's how Oscar Levant and Eugene Ormandy do it on their 1945 recording. It's how Bernstein did it. It's how just about everybody does it these days.

The thing is, in order to do that passage, and that section, without the double-time distortion, you have to hit a pretty precise mark, tempo-wise: it has to be fast enough that the last six bars don't bog down (the Gershwin/Whiteman recording does plod a bit) but not so fast that the first two bars are trivialized. If you can hit that mark (about ♩=120, I've come to think, maybe a shade faster, though 126 seems a little too fast), it's kind of a structural boon: you can take the next eight pages or so, all the way up through the following Agitato section, at essentially the same tempo. But then you're more locked in than if you slide into the Andantino with Romantic languor, and then rubato the heck out of those six-bar consequent phrases. The performance practice that's evolved, in other words, gives the performer more room to maneuver—and more room for error.

The question that I've been thinking about is: does such room to maneuver also make the performance more expressive? At about the same time I started wrestling with the varying speeds of Rhapsody in Blue, I read this review of a concert from this summer's Sick Puppy festivities, and was struck by this description of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Kontakte:

I tend toward agreement with one of my seatmates, who described the experience as highly engaging intellectually, but emotionally remote.

I don't wish to take the reviewer to task—I adore Stockhausen's music, but I fully understand that it's not everyone's cup of tea. Still, I was intrigued by the phrase "emotionally remote," since, to me, anyway, Kontakte is, if anything, emotionally in your face pretty much all the way through. (Here's a recording to sample.) The emotions, though, are not those usually associated with musical expressiveness.

It might be useful to reference Robert Plutchik's classification of emotions, in particular the way he divides emotions into opposite pairs. Musical expression tends to be those pairs on Plutchik's N-S-E-W axes: joy and sadness, anger and fear—perusing this summation of recent research into emotional communication in musical performance, the bulk of empirical research has surrounded those types of emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and love. My emotional experience of Kontakte, though, falls mostly onto one of Plutchik's in-between axes: the tension between anticipation and surprise.

Here's a typical section of the score to Kontakte:


There's a bit of leeway in the performers' staves, but it's always in the context of those implacable numbers at the top of the score, the music's running time, broken down to tenth-of-a-second accuracy. It's both the source of Kontakte's emotional effect and the subversion of our accustomed perception of it. To do a Rhapsody-like indulgently-slow-then-double-time move is completely foreign to this context. Any momentary freedom on the part of the performers is immediately yanked back into Kontakte's grid by the necessity of synchronization with the electronic component. And that seems to conflict with what we've come to accept as communicating musical expressivity. The notion was concisely stated back in 1925 by psychologists Carl Seashore and Milton Metfessel:

This deviation from the exact is, on the whole, the medium for the creation of the beautiful—for the conveying of emotion. That is the secret of the plasticity of art. The exact is cold, restricted, and unemotional; and, however beautiful, in itself soon palls upon us.

Obviously—given my enthusiasm for the exacting emotional world of Kontakte—I don't buy that. But for all the modernist effort to demonstrate they are, in fact, two different things, the conflation of expressivity and emotionality persists. The more expressive emotions are not false; but mere expressivity is not the end-all of emotional experience. And a sidelong glance into the worlds of politics or nationalism or fundamentalisms of various kinds offers no end of warning signs for exclusively associating emotion with expressiveness.

It's interesting that, after Rhapsody in Blue, Gershwin came around to the greater precision of metronome markings. The only one of his subsequent concert works that doesn't include them is An American in Paris, and the experience of hearing Walter Damrosch conduct it too slowly apparently converted Gershwin. The Second Rhapsody is diligent with metronome indications, as is the Cuban Overture, as is the Variations on "I Got Rhythm." And it's equally interesting that none of those works has ever attained the place in the repertoire of Rhapsody in Blue. It might just be a coincidence—or it might be a measure of the general equating of performer freedom with communicative effectiveness. My own heresy: as much as I love Rhapsody in Blue, I kind of think that the Second Rhapsody is a better piece of music. But, then again, I know that I'm at the margins of the mainstream of perceived musical emotion. I don't mind—I may not get swept off my feet quite as easily, but the payoff is a view of the world made just a little more lucid.

Cross-posted at The Faster Times.

Full-court press

Reviewing Dean, Schubert, Hétu et al. at Yellow Barn.
Boston Globe, July 18, 2011.

Summer sun, something's begun

Reviewing the Boston Landmarks Orchestra.
Boston Globe, July 16, 2011.

Operas as summarized by the lyrics of "Ashes to Ashes"

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: Do you remember a guy that's been in such an early song?

Licht: I heard a rumor from Ground Control.

Moses und Aron: They got a message from the action man.

Der Freischütz:

Aennchen: I'm happy; hope you're happy, too.

Don Giovanni: I've loved all I needed to love; sordid details following.

Elektra: The shrieking of nothing is killing.

Madama Butterfly: Just pictures of Jap girls in synthesis.

La Bohème: I ain't got no money.

Samson et Dalila: I ain't got no hair.

Götterdämmerung: I'm hoping to kick, but the planet—it's glowing.

Thaïs:

Thaïs: Strung out in heaven's high!
Athanaël: Hitting an all-time low.

Tannhäuser: Time and again I tell myself, "I'll stay clean tonight."

The Merry Widow: I'm stuck with a valuable friend.

The Midsummer Marriage: One flash of light, but no smoking pistol.

Mefistofele: I never done good things.

Albert Herring: I never done bad things.

Der fliegende Holländer: I never did anything out of the blue.

The Ice Break: Want an axe to break the ice.

Tosca: Want to come down right now.

Wozzeck: My mother said, to get things done, you better not mess with Major Tom.

10-Hour Party People

Reviewing the SICPP Sick Puppy Iditarod.
Boston Globe, June 27, 2011.

Salient solution

Smoked meat (full-fat) at Schwartz's.

This summer's annual fall-off-the-blogging-bicycle was brought to you by Soho the Dog's brief all-staff jaunt to Montreal and Québec. And also this week's Boston Early Music Festival gauntlet. But mostly the trip north, during which we spoke French extremely badly but still ate extremely well. Très bien! The best restaurant music we heard was in Québec City, where, after hiking all day through St.-Roch, we wandered into the Cafe Abraham-Martin in the Complexe Méduse just as the owner put on David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust—the whole album. *pompe le poing* (The worst was also in Québec City, when an otherwise lovely lunch at Laurie Raphaël was accompanied by this—in a remix that Went. On. Forever.)

Anyway, one of the happenings I missed was the announcement that the board of directors of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra had re-signed president Anne Parsons for another three years. Parsons was the face of management during the orchestra's six-month strike—in fact, the deal was agreed to back in March, before the strike had even ended.

This sort of thing, it turns out, is something of a minor DSO tradition. Back in 1919, the pianist and conductor Ossip Gabrilowitsch gave the DSO an ultimatum: he would only sign on as music director if he got a new concert hall.

The directors of the Orchestral Association decided that they had no choice but to build a new hall. A hastily assembled building committee selected C. Howard Crane as the architect. Within two weeks the committee had purchased the site of old Wesminster Presbyterian Church and raised half a million dollars in building funds. Crane's general contractor—prepared to work day and night to rush the building to completion—promised that it would be finished on schedule.... The contractor further showed his zeal by starting demolition of the church at a corner of the roof while a final wedding ceremony was still going on inside.

(Source.) Orchestra Hall—now part of the Max M. Fisher Music Center—is today one of the orchestra's biggest financial headaches, the collateral on a $54 million balloon loan taken out in the face of what was revealed to be the financial bubble of the last decade. Decisions like that have not exactly reflected well on the prowess of the DSO board, and while the Music Center debacle predates Parsons, when that board expresses its confidence in her ("proven expertise in navigating challenging economic climates," according to the board chair, who also runs a commercial real-estate company—hmmmm), it does create a bit of a with-friends-like-these situation. Hence the head of the orchestral committee calling Parsons' contract extension "disappointing and puzzling." (Definitely puzzling timing—was a change in management on the negotiating table? Outside supporters were calling for it, at least.)

A change of leadership would seem to be a common-sense move in Detroit, if only to clear the air of lingering bad feelings. But, then again, there are plenty of organizations—orchestras included—that are rife with bad feelings yet still hold up just fine. It might be a little more trenchant to say that a change of leadership is necessary based on a political-scientific analysis of European fiscal policy in reaction to the OPEC oil shocks of the 1970s. No, really! Well, maybe only kind of, but still fun to think about. Consider the work of Fritz W. Scharpf, emeritus director of the Max Planck Insititute for the Study of Societies. For a long time, Scharpf's main research topic has been European integration and the difficulties and contradictions therein, but along the way, he's come up with a nicely trenchant way of thinking about the relationship between varying approaches to economic policy and political legitimacy.

Back in the 1970s, the decision by OPEC to pump up oil prices put a severe strain on the then-prevalent Keynesian model of macroeconomic management—government spending and tax cuts to stimulate demand, spending cuts and tax increases to keep demand (and inflation) from overheating. As Scharpf explains:

Under these conditions, governments committed to Keynesian demand management were confronted with a dilemma: If they chose to fight unemployment with monetary and fiscal demand reflation, they would generate escalating rates of inflation; but if they would instead fight inflation with restrictive fiscal and monetary policies, the result would be mass unemployment.

What's more—

In Germany and Switzerland, by contrast, governments were unable to reflate the economy because monetary policy was determined by an independent central bank that was unconditionally committed to the defense of price stability—in which case the bank's tight-money policy would neutralize expansionary fiscal impulses.... Under these conditions, major job losses were unavoidable. They could only be softened if real wages were quickly adjusted downwards, which was true in Germany and Switzerland but not in the other hard-currency countries practicing an imported (and perhaps less clearly understood) version of the Bundesbank's monetarism.

The Bundesbank—Germany's central bank—was long marked (pun—ha) by its devotion to monetarist policies: basically, focusing on maintaining price stability via control of the money supply rather than aiming for full employment by stimulating demand. It's supply-side, rather than demand-side policy, the kind of thing that can lead to massive deficits (e.g., Reagan-era US) or massive unemployment (e.g., Thatcher-era UK). In Germany, though, it worked pretty well for a lot of the 1970s and 80s. How come? In a talk he gave at the London School of Economics last month, Scharpf sums up:

[The Bundesbank] took great pains to explain, to the government, the unions and the public, how coordination by monetary policy would not only ensure price stability but also produce economically superior and politically justifiable macroeconomic outcomes. Once rampant inflation was brought under control, it would precisely monitor the state of the German economy and pre-announce annual monetary targets by reference to the current “output gap”. Maximum non-inflationary growth would then be achieved if fiscal policy would merely allow the “automatic stabilizers” to rise and fall over the business cycle, and if wages would rise with labor productivity.... In other words, responsibility for the management of the economy would be assumed by the “non-political” monetary policy of the independent Bank, whereas non-inflationary fiscal and wage policies could be conducted with a low political profile.

In Scharpf's analysis, Keynesian policies have high political salience—because they directly involve taxes and government services, they tend to produce strong and immediate political reactions. Monetarist policies have low political salience—they're pretty technical and behind-the-scenes, so there's some insulation from the churn of the political surface. But monetarist policies require that such low salience be maintained—which is why the Bundesbank did so much legwork getting everybody on board, ensuring low salience down the line. (Compare with the period of German reunification, when the Bundesbank was pulled into more highly politically salient waters against Chancellor Helmut Kohl, with resulting damage to the Bundesbank's reputation.)

And now for the question that explicitly or implicitly comes along in at least 75% of posts in this space: So where exactly is this going? Well, it's hardly an exact analogue, but orchestras respond to fiscal crises with policies that are more or less monetarist. While it might be fun to see what would happen if an orchestra tried to spend its way out of a crisis in the Keynesian manner, it can't really happen because orchestras can't issue debt. Instead, they cut—they cut costs, they cut wages, they cut performances, &c. But, as in Germany, that only works in an atmosphere of low political salience—the exact opposite of what the DSO has managed to achieve. Even if you happen to think that managerial brinkmanship was the DSO's best plan, if we borrow Scharpf's ideas, it fairly guarantees that there's no way to get back to a low-salience situation without either a change of management or a change of orchestra—severely curtailing the possibility of any further monetarist solutions to any subsequent crises. (Again, perhaps not an exact analytical fit, but pointing in an interesting direction.)

High political salience really brings out a lot of the more curious organizational aspects of orchestras—for instance, the way the players are not just employees, but also the product, and a crucial political constituency. It also points up that boards and, by extension, management, are not always terribly accountable—high political salience demands such accountability in governmental situations, but boards are largely self-governing. This is not to say that all boards are untenable; some boards, at least, appreciate the value of low salience. This is, again, a pretty fancy justification for what would seem to be common sense. But it does hint at how, if this kind of non-profit doesn't happen to have either an institutional history or a managerial interest in maintaining deep, representative, competent governance, it can be pretty hard to get that to change, even when the need is obvious.

Detroit's Orchestra Hall and the bit of land it sits on—the corner of Woodward Avenue and Parsons Street—has some interesting accountability karma. Woodward Avenue runs along the original Saginaw Trail. The plot was originally one of the so-called Park Lots, created in 1806 when the U.S. Congress authorized the "Governor and Judges' Plan," an appropriation of land that was previously a common. The lots were supposed to be distributed to settlers who had been displaced by the massive fire of 1805, with the remainder to be sold to raise money for a courthouse and jail. Instead, officials repeatedly dragged the process out, in order to squeeze out the original inhabitants, buy up lots for themselves, and fuel a speculative real-estate boom. Silas Farmer, Detroit's 19th-century city historiographer, was rather elegantly sarcastic about it in his History of Detroit and Wayne County:

The Governor and Judges, first in charge, undoubtedly assumed unlawful power in giving away lots to various churches and societies, and exceeded their authority in many particulars. None of these powers were included in the Act creating the Land Board. The ease with which their sessions changed from land-board to legislative, and from legislative to judicial, as the exigencies of the case seemed to them to demand, was something marvellous even for that time of transition.

Only twenty years after its 1919 construction, the DSO vacated Orchestra Hall, the financial pressures of the Depression being too much to handle. The city seized the hall in 1941 for non-payment of taxes, then sold it to Ben and Lou Cohen, who already owned a chain of theatres; the Cohen brothers re-opened the Hall as the Paradise, which played host to some of the biggest jazz acts of the time. When, in 1970, the structure faced demolition at the hands of the fast-food hamburger chain Gino's, a concerned-citizens committee was able to buy it and begin restorations.

The Orchestra moved back in 1989—which means that Orchestra Hall has only housed an orchestra for well less than half of its existence. On the one hand, the Hall is a tribute to the DSO's perseverance; on the other hand, it is a fount of cautionary tales. But the board seems disinterested in learning from the past, once again throwing a wedding while knocking down the church.

Equal opportunity

Reviewing Kristian Bezuidenhout.
Boston Globe, June 20, 2011.

Additive synthesis

Reviewing Marc-André Hamelin.
Boston Globe, June 20, 2011.

Steppin' Out

Reviewing the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra.
Boston Globe, June 18, 2011.

Soul to soul, brother to brother, a cappella

Reviewing The King's SIngers.
Boston Globe, June 17, 2011.

Old School

Reviewing Early Music America's Young Performers Festival.
Boston Globe, June 17, 2011.

Transformers

Reviewing A Far Cry.
Boston Globe, June 14, 2011.

Shir Heart, Attack

Reviewing Chorus pro Musica.
Boston Globe, June 7, 2011.