20.3.11

In Brief: St. Patrick's Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond.
  • Happy St. Patrick's Day! Thanks to former colleague Meghan Leahy for the tip on this video, the hands-down best rendition of Danny Boy in the known universe. [YouTube]

  • Popular taste, especially in our mass media-saturated world, is so fickle that it is ridiculous to base any judgments on its oscillations. Nothing proves that more than the occasional appearance of something other than vacuous pop music, like the Chant recordings a few years ago, on the pop charts. Now a late Renaissance Mass setting, by Alessandro Striggio, rediscovered in 2007 and recorded by I Fagiolini, has made the jump into the pop charts, albeit only at no. 68. [The Independent]

  • In one of the savviest media moves of the year, Washingtonian swooped in to pick up Sommer Mathis -- who was formerly the editor of DCist -- after the fall of TBD.com. [Politico]

  • With hat tip to Jessa Crispin, your St. Patrick's Week Day news is that Dracula was Irish. Well, at least Bram Stoker was. [MobyLives]

  • These comics, featuring Chopin and Liszt, are hilarious. With hat tip to Douglas Wolk -- in unrelated news, Douglas and I went to the same high school for a couple years, and we have both ended up writing about music among other things. [Hark, a vagrant]

  • Tis the season for season announcements -- we just made it back up to Shriver Hall for the first time in a while, to hear Andre Watts, and that venue has announced its lineup for 2011-12. Piano fans will be glad to hear Angela Hewitt and Richard Goode again, while chamber music fans will have the Takács Quartet and recitals by violinist Christian Tetzlaff and cellist Steven Isserlis. There is even something for vocal-heads, a recital by Wolfgang Holzmair, and for us HIPsters, Les Violons du Roy with recorder player Maurice Steger. [Shriver Hall]

  • The Cleveland Orchestra, which sabotaged music critic Donald Rosenberg, has now hired its own in-house critic, Enrique Fernández, who will apparently make benefit for glorious nation of Cleveland Orchestra. Terry Teachout has some thoughts. [Wall Street Journal]

1 comment:

  1. Who gets to tell the Independent they need to rewrite that picture caption?

    By sheer coincidence, I was listening to a Tallis CD (by the Winchester Cathedral Choir, on Hyperion) whose liner notes include that same portrait.

    ReplyDelete