~ Music-Related ~
On Saturday night I saw Boris, a Japanese metal band that has been around for 25 years or so, at Neumos in Seattle. Two bands played first: Endon (also from Japan) and Sumac. As always I tended to focus on the drummers. I hadn't really listened to any of these bands' albums prior to this, but a go...
Tonight I had a 3rd-tier box seat right over the Seattle Symphony. The program:
- Brahms - Tragic Overture
I've never been into this piece, but in person it's super-rich and interesting, especially close up.
- Bartok - Piano Concerto #1 (Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, piano)
This was a blast. I've see...
Tonight I saw Marc-André Hamelin play live at Benaroya Hall — in the big hall, not in the recital hall. Good as it is, the accoustic was too large. Quieter music was magical, but whenever it got louder the resonance of the hall blurred the sound. Not that Hamelin was ever crashy — not at all. He did...
Here we have pure, sweet happiness, two discs for the price of one! The duo Alina Ibragimova (violin) and Cédric Tiberghien (piano) have recorded three previous double-disc albums of Mozart's violin & piano music, every one great, but this one tops them all. Part of it is the tasty,...
Want something different? This is fantastic. The "cantata" is a church music form, but these are more like children's fairy tales, each with its own atmospheric character and instrumentation. The first even has an accordion, and one has a narrator. The titles give you an idea of the...
I've liked many things from pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, and I credit this series with helping me get to know Haydn's sonatas... and this release is getting good reviews... but I find myself annoyed by this album. Maybe it's partly the music — few of these particular sonatas grab me...
"La Nativité du Seigneur" is a collection of organ pieces by Messiaen, played complete this evening at Saint James Cathedral by high school senior Matthew Johnson. He may be young but it didn't show. He's been a piano student since he was little and later an official organ scholar at the cathedral....
The organist Renée Anne Louprette was the real deal, and the organ at St. James was fantastic, as was the accoustic. We sat on the side in the middle (on the advice of an elderly gentleman who knew his stuff), so we got the sound from both directions. Somehow I've never been to a recital at St. Jame...
Neumos was packed to the sweaty gills with fans so we stood crammed together the whole time, but despite the excitement I found a lot of the music surprisingly dull (and the sound at Neumos was awful). There were some good songs, especially when the drummer had more irregular stuff to do, but overal...
Music is universal, sort of. I mean, could a teenager ever get this music? Elgar's 2nd is a hard nut to crack to begin with, but I can't imagine it being comprehensible to someone with less emotional experience.
Beyond form and color, or through it, this music presents a contrast...
Music-Related
Favorite Albums of 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017
Music in "Year of the Amphibian"
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Eric Hoffer Awards 2019:
- Finalist, Fiction
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- Finalist, General Fiction / Novel (over 80,000 words)
- Finalist, First Novel (over 90,000 words)
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