Notes by Philip Carlsen Listen to these notes on Youtube Listen to these notes on Spotify This concert begins and ends with wind quintet transcriptions of organ pieces from the eighteenth century. The six other pieces on the program, from roughly the last hundred years, were all written specifically for winds. In a sense, all … Read more
Notes by Philip Carlsen Listen to these notes on Youtube Listen to these notes on Spotify Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Mikhail Pletnev Tchaikovsky’s two-act ballet The Nutcracker received its first staged production in St. Petersburg in December 1892. Nine months earlier, he conducted a preview with a suite of eight scenes drawn from the ballet, … Read more
Notes by Philip Carlsen Listen to these notes on Youtube Listen to these notes on Spotify Conrad Tao has put together an astonishing, provocative program that dances back and forth across the hazy boundary between notated music and improvisation. It encourages us to think about composing and improvising as a never-ending, wide-ranging conversation that musicians … Read more