Sprightly

Ok, so the fellow who tried to sell me a stereo must be working for Gramophone Magazine… *** Glinka - Overture to Ruslan and Ludmila Rachmaninov - Symphony No. 3 Tchaikovsky - Piano Concerto No. 1 Ludovic Morlot, conductor Simon Trpceski, piano Ludovic Morlot kind of sounds like the name for a Harry Potter-esque villain. In truth he’s a capable stick man and couldn’t be a nicer fellow, maybe too nice. Sadly, there’s a certain nastiness quotient necessary for a conductor to achieve real greatness. But the entire program had a kind of lightweight summer season feel to it anyway. We used to have a guy here (music director, I think – name escapes me) who frequently programmed the Glinka Overture to Ruslan and Ludmila as an encore and took it really, really, really fast – maybe even too fast, but who am I to say. He also had the habit of hiding the baton when taking the final curtain call so he could leap onto the podium and astonish the crowd by starting the encore unexpectedly. One day w...

High Fidelity audio is another thing to get nostalgic about, what with the now ubiquitous I pods and compressed audio winning the day. When I first joined the orchestra the thing to do (or so I became convinced) was to shop for an expensive audio system. Reasonably, it seemed an essential accessory for the serious professional musician, not to mention a sizeable tax-deduction. I consented to accompanying a colleague to one of those stuffy audio places – where they take you into a soundproofed room, offer something to drink, sit you down in a comfy leather chair and proceed to push thousands of dollars worth of audio equipment. I confess to being something of a skeptic when it comes to high-end audio gear – maybe you could call me decidedly lo-fi – probably how I’ve managed to tolerate playing the double bass all these years. Anyway, the preoccupation with minute details of the performance of various audio components always struck me as somehow antithetical to the spirit of music makin...