I’ve spent the last few weeks visiting friends and family in New York, London, Salzburg and Belfast. It’s been wonderful catching up with their news, and also sharing mine, much of which has been about what we’ve been doing in Jacksonville. Invariably, everyone asks what the first concert of the New Year is. It’s a program that looks quite straightforward on paper, but in reality it’s one of the most difficult of the season: Beethoven’s Second Symphony, Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto and Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony. What exactly makes some pieces of music more difficult than others? I’m often surprised at how back-to-front audiences’ ideas about this are. Some moments that seem very impressive are actually rather easy to pull off, like the loud and fast music

Continue readingSibelius 7 and what’s difficult in music

I’ve been in New York for the past week, auditioning singers for an opera and conducting at the Juilliard School. The city is gearing up for the holidays, with enticing displays appearing in the grand shop fronts of Fifth Avenue, and a sickly stream of canned musak beginning to percolate every public space. Thankfully our musical offerings at the Jacksonville Symphony will be rather more diverse, with Holiday Pops in December, our annual performances of The Nutcracker and The Messiah, and a glamorous New Year’s Eve concert conducted by Steven Reineke. I’m also delighted to see opera return to our stage with next weekend’s performances of Humperdinck’s fairy tale masterpiece, Hansel and Gretel. Engelbert Humperdinck is known today almost exclusively for his opera from 1893.

Continue readingHumperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel