In praise of the slacker lifestyle

Am I proud to be a slacker? Can a conductor be a slacker? (I think we all know the answer) During my summer in the conducting program at Aspen I was often struck by the ability of my former teacher David Zinman to always have at his mental fingertips a wealth of...

Style and Range

I’m having an early Beethoven year so far- two runs of Beethoven 1 with the SMP last month, now Beethoven 2 in Pendleton, with the 4th to follow in a few weeks at the Helix Ensemble. There hasn’t been a whole lot of time to revisit recordings of these pieces- I’ve...

What language we sangin’ in, anyway?

Monday night I saw our Chorale and the members of the Mid-Columbia Master Singers in Richland, Washington. Our first challenge was getting used to a venue nobody had sung in before- the Master Singers’ usual venue was not open. I was a little nervous about having only...

Battle of the Beethoven Urtexts

I attracted a few titters (as opposed to twitters) on Facebook the other day, when my status admitted I was in the process of comparing Urtext editions of Beethoven’s 2nd Symphony by Jonathan Del Mar (published by Barenreiter) and Clive Brown (published by Breitkopf...