[From Greg: A followup to Erica's guest post yesterday, about the performance of Winterreise she did in a small town. Here she tells us what she said before the performance, to introduce the piece to an audience that doesn't know classical music. This is one of the best introductions to a classical piece I've ever seen. An inspiration, in my view, for us all.] Ed and I are so glad that you have joined us here today.  I’ve had the opportunity to perform this incredible set of songs before but I was struck today, as my husband and I were … [Read more...]

[From Greg: Again I'm happy to introduce a guest blogger, my friend Erica Sipes, a pianist and cellist who plays and teaches in rural Virginia. Erica brings a perspective that I certainly don't have: She tells us what it's like to bring a new audience to classical music in small towns. For an overview of her thoughts on that — invaluable, I think — see her own blog posts about the classical city mouse, and the classical country mouse. In the post you'll read here (which she and I decided we'd crosspost from her blog)  she talks with deep … [Read more...]

[From Greg: Here's another guest blogger. I met Liza Kravinsky maybe a year ago, when she hired me as a consultant, to help her work out a strategy for launching the project she describes here. The things we talked about don't enter into her post; maybe they'll come up in later posts she might make, or maybe they won't. That doesn't matter, because what I loved was the project itself. And especially the way that it didn't simply combine pop and classical music — that's been done quite a lot — but also brought together pop and classical … [Read more...]

[From Greg: Again I'm happy to introduce a guest blogger, our second one, pianist/composer Nathan Shirley. He brings us his favorite classical music videos, and I think it's a marvelous list, lively, provocative, and — as the best lists of this kind are — highly individual. We'll save it as a permanent blog sidebar, in the "Resources" section on the right, on the main blog page. This section will expand over time, and I hope will become an archive of ideas and information, useful for anyone interested in the future of classical music. Nathan's … [Read more...]

When I saw I had 16 comments on my latest post about CD covers (and more have come in since), I knew I'd provoked a storm. And I had. Many of the commenters objected to the Lara Downes CD cover — for her album Exiles' Café — I offered as an example of something good. (Shown here.) Which is perfectly fair. Nobody's required to have my taste. But the reasons for not liking it! You can't see her whole face. She's not in focus. She's on a slant. "It looks like when my five-year old goes on a shooting spree with my phone camera." It's soft … [Read more...]