Wow- I’ve won my very own Premios Dardo award, thanks to Jen at Adventures of an Idaho Violist. I’ve been trying to get Jen in with the Oregon East Symphony for a while now, as I’d love to work with her, and I think it would be a hoot having a blogger in the orchestra for a concert I’m also blogging about. Fingers crossed that something works out before I finish up there.

So, here are the rules of the Premios Dardo awards-

1- Accept the award, post it on your blog together with the name of the person that has granted the award and his or her blog link.

2- Pass the award to at least 5 blogs that are worthy of this acknowledgment. Remember to contact each of them to let them know they have been chosen for this award.

These exercises are always good for a laugh, and hopefully help stir a bit of fresh traffic for all involved. All of the blogs on my blogroll are worthy of listing, so in trying to cut the list back down to five, I’ve tried to pick not only blogs that I enjoy, but also some that I think could use a bit more exposure, or that I’ve only discovered fairly recently…

1- Black Dogs- Insightful, opinionated and committed writing about music, and hilarious takes on life and food. Author RAD Stainforth has got it all wrong about Mendelssohn and all right about Schumann- which I find odd, since their reputations were both wrecked for a hundred years by Wagner. Still- I can forgive the Mendelssohn thing, but I continue to be baffled by the affection for the gut-busting horrors of the Full English Breakfast.

2- Horndog Blog- A fairly recent discovery for me, Bruce Hembd has a lot of interesting and funny takes on music and some useful practical insights on horn playing and the psychology of brass playing in general. He’d make this list alone for bringing to my attention the Onion’s recent “brass section is sucking up to the conductor” news story.

3- Johnson Rambler– Author Tim Rutherford Johnson is New Music-centric, informative and entertaining. To my profound irritation, his take on the recent NYT feature on the use of music in Peanuts was way funnier and cleverer than mine.

4- Composer Bastard- Bryan-Kirk Reinhardt must certainly hold the all time record for most comments at Vftp, but he still has time to maintain a great blog of his own. Right about Rachmaninoff, but wrong about Downie. We haven’t heard from him here in a while- he’s probably pouting because I’m doing Mahler again.

5- On An Overgrown Path- Hardly a new discovery and not suffering for lack of recognition (how many NYT mentions has he gotten? I’ve gotten the Gramophone and BBC features, but it’s the Times I covet now. Oh, how I covet them….). All the more reason to tag him- hopefully he can plug five deserving blogs to his huge audience.