That black-tie extravaganza at Cambridge University, the debate on young people in classical music that my side so decisively lost -- you can stream it now. Complete. Lots of fun, I think. It's a long stream -- nearly two hours. I'm at about 1'17" In black-tie splendor. And as I said in my post on the debate, the best thing about it was meeting my co-debaters, on both sides, and talking in the most friendly way about the issues we'd knocked around.  … [Read more...]

An oddball item here, maybe more interesting to musicians than others. Or maybe not! Your call. First a conundrum. Or at least a conundrum for me. Twenty-five bars from the end of the third movement, in a passage marked Presto, Mahler writes what follows for the three bassoons (in unison) and the tuba (joined, with a slightly different configuration of notes, by the contrabassoon and the bass clarinet). It's in the bass clef, of course:And then two bars later comes this, for the same instruments:So -- bassoonists, tuba players, … [Read more...]

This is a long post. But the part I'd most love you to see comes toward the end, where I quote a heartbreaking reminiscence of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder -- his songs about the death of children -- in his Ninth Symphony, which is about his own death. For me, it's profoundly moving to hear the two passages back to back, the music from the song simple and direct, its distant memory in the symphony already evaporated into a world that's not ours. So if you're not inclined to read  the whole post, scroll to the reminiscence. You'll see … [Read more...]