An interesting concept--showing real pictures on a screen during a performance of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.

From a press release:

Live orchestral performances from the USC Thornton Symphony and conductor Carl St.Clair will be augmented with stunning multimedia images to accompany a production of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition Sept. 12 and 13 at Santa Barbara’s Granada Theatre.

The renovated 91-year-old Spanish theater recently installed a high-definition projector to stage the production. Along with high-definition projections on a large screen, the two concerts will feature a new technology, Muséik, developed by Ion Concert Media, which allows a human operator to manipulate the multimedia visuals as the operator sits amid the orchestra’s musicians. Muséik’s developer, Ion Concert Media’s founder Scott Winters, will be “playing” the visuals from an iPad, taking cues from conductor St.Clair.

In addition to Pictures at an Exhibition, the two concerts will feature virtuosic pianist Daniel Pollack, professor of Keyboard Studies at the USC Thornton School of Music, playing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Pollack famously performed the piece in Moscow during the legendary first International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition, where Pollack was a prizewinner along with Van Cliburn. The USC Thornton Symphony also will be performing the overture to Mikhail Glinka’s opera Ruslan and Ludmilla.

St.Clair, the artistic director of the USC Thornton Orchestra Program and music director of the Pacific Symphony, said the symphony’s opportunity to play at the Granada Theatre is a tribute to the high quality of its past performances at Disney Hall and Bovard Auditorium.

“Not every university orchestra is asked to play at venues that regularly host touring orchestras and the Santa Barbara Symphony,” he said.

Mussorgsky based Pictures at an Exhibition on paintings and drawings of the Russian artist Viktor Hartmann, a friend of Mussorgsky’s whose early death stunned the composer. In these performances, the visuals were created using a mix of 2-D and 3-D animation, illustrations, live action photography and stop-motion animation.

The work was created by USC School of Cinematic Arts’ John C. Hench Division of Animation and Digital Arts faculty members Michael Patterson and Candace Reckinger, along with 11 of their animation students and graduates. They premiered the projections in 2011 with the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, FL, as part of the celebration for that symphony’s new building. There, the projections were shown on five screens that surrounded the audience inside the concert hall.

This summer, Patterson and Reckinger, who are the creative directors of the Pictures at an Exhibition visuals, spent several weeks reconfiguring the work for a single panoramic projection. The two, who trained as mixed-media directors, said combining music and visuals can result in a rich immersive experience for the audience.

Houston Public Media has announced that they will be selling the frequency they are currently using to air classical music 24-hours a day.  They will follow the model a number of other stations have used, which is to place classical music on an HD channel.

HD radio is available to almost no one--radios are hard to find, car manufacturers place them in very few vehicles, and the cost of replacing all of one's radios with HD capable sets can be prohibitive.  While HD streams are also available on the web, this also makes it more difficult to access as opposed to simply turning on an FM radio.  Only a small portion of radio listening takes place via the web--the vast majority is over the air.

This is the second large market to lose classical music recently--Miami/south Florida is also losing the music due to APM's sale of Classical South Florida.

I can't say that I'd ever heard of author Philip Pullman until today, but he was one of a number of people asked to write an article for the magazine "Intelligent Life" regarding what they felt was the most important subject school students ought to study.  Pullman--a former English teacher--chose music as the most important subject.

You can read his article here.

Paul Silverthorne, principal violist of the London Symphony Orchestra is stepping down after 25 years with the ensemble to take a teaching position in China.  He will become professor of viola and chamber music at Soochow University.

The VIolin Channel website has more here.

There seemed to be a problem with the link I posted yesterday, so to learn more, you should be able to click here.

Actually it's a mixed format station, but there's an opening at WBAA, located at Purdue University.  The opening is for a Music Director, primarily over the classical hours, but also supervising the HD/webstream jazz service.

Details can be found here.

Slovenian tenor Ambroz Bajec-Lapajne was diagnosed last year with a brain tumor that was aggressive, and required immediate surgery.  To make sure his ability to sing and recognize pitch was not affected by the surgery, he was kept awake during the operation, was joined by a pianist in the OR, and was asked to sing at various points during the surgery.

He is doing fine now, but has posted a video of the operation if you're interested.  Just click here.

Seiji Ozawa, former conductor of the Boston Symphony, fell recently, suffering a hip fracture.  As a result, he is cancelling a scheduled gig conducting an opera in Japan later this month, though he reportedly is planning to carry through with other conducting commitments in September.

Ozawa has not been in the best of health in recent years, having surgery for esophageal cancer in 2010 along with other issues.  Ozawa was in a Kyoto hospital when he fell.

You can read more here.

If you're British conductor Kenneth Alwyn, you celebrate by landing a helicopter on a golf course.

The story is here.

Recently my station divested itself of our vinyl holdings--we  were moving into new facilities with no turntables, the music library as I had it envisioned in the plans got modified so as to have little room to house the collection, and the expense of storing them in a climate controlled facility seemed pointless.  While it was a hard decision, we felt we had few other options.

So I found this article interesting--Armed Forces Radio at Guantanimo is holding onto it's 20000 LPs despite a recall years ago from the Armed Forces Network.

You can read about it here.