Orcas Island – Multiple Destinations

August 23, 2011    We need to have a quiet talk about pianists and their closet desires to be percussionists. In fact, we already are: by any rational definition, the piano is a percussion instrument – we hit a key, which in turn causes a hammer to hit a string, and sound is produced. But most pianists
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Orcas Island – Children and Archdukes

August 18, 2011Program 2 of the Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival – “The Archduke” – featured two trios, the romantic Spanish-flavored Trio of Joaquin Turina, and the weighty gravitas of Beethoven’s mighty Archduke Trio. With the presence of the Gryphon trio, Artistic Director Aloysia Friedmann had the choice of who should play what… and wisely chose first
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Orcas Island – A Poet’s Love

August 15, 2011Season 14 of the Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival has begun! A Poet’s Love took its audience on a musical journey so extraordinary that when I polled concertgoers at the post-concert reception and asked “So, what traditional element of a chamber music festival concert was missing?!” nobody came up with the answer. (More on that
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Gypsy Music@Menlo

August 7, 2011So what is Gypsy Music? What is Hungarian folk music? How do we even know a folk tune is a folk tune? Why is it called the “Brahms Hungarian Dance No. 5″ when it’s not written by Brahms? These are some of the questions that Music@Menlo asked this week in its program Alla Zingarese. Composer/broadcaster/speaker
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Making Music@Menlo

August 5, 2011Music@Menlo is a unique festival. I’ve been here two days and already their video team headed by Tristan Cook has shot, edited and posted this teaching portrait. This kind of frenetic behind-the-scenes activity is emblematic of what makes this festival stand apart: you can go online and truly experience Music@Menlo from afar, and I suggest
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